How I verify every fact.

I credited NASA with something NASA does not do there. And my first correction was wrong too.

The NASA project that does happen in Atacama is ARADS, and it happens in the hyper-arid Yungay area, not in the Valley of the Moon. I had two separate cards and lent one the other's credit. I corrected it, and the correction claimed the place was an ancient salt lake floor while crediting the National Monuments Council, which does not say that either. Only the third version rests on what the body actually states.

What I learned: correcting a borrowed claim does not guarantee the one replacing it is verified. Both times I made the same underlying mistake, which was writing first and looking for the backing afterwards.

I blamed the wrong plague, and leaned on a trade body instead of a paper.

The paper documenting the case does not say phylloxera wiped it out: it says it became nearly extinct in France because of poor fruit set and late ripening. The plague destroyed the vineyards, but what kept it from being replanted was agronomic. The cited source was also an industry association talking about its own product, which is exactly what the hierarchy above does not accept.

The sources that stayed are two peer-reviewed papers: Hinrichsen et al. (American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, 2001), which is the DNA evidence and is signed by the very ampelographer who made the discovery, and Minio et al. (G3, 2019), which documents the arrival in Chile in the 1850s.

I stated something the archaeological evidence has left in dispute.

Here a better URL was not enough, the text had to change. The original claim is disputed among specialists, so the card now rests on a documented fact with a date and a name, which is also more specific and more interesting than what it replaced.

I cited a TV channel as a source.

The card's fact was correct and has not changed. What was wrong was the backing: History Channel is not an acceptable source under my own rules, and having it there made the card uncheckable even though it was true. It now points to the NASA program that does happen in the desert.

The cited source did not support the number on the card.

The card states that Lake Llanquihue is Chile's second largest. That is a hydrographic fact produced by the water authority, not by the tourism agency. Citing Sernatur was not exactly false, it was worse: it was citing someone with no reason to know.

A new edition of the ranking came out and Chile dropped. I swapped in the worse figure.

This is the most boring case on the list and that is exactly why I keep it: nobody would have noticed. A feel-good number that gets worse is precisely the one you do not feel like updating, and it is the test of whether the rule works or is decorative. It was also changed in the welcome email, which repeated the old figure.

I nearly published that Gabriela Mistral was Latin America's first Nobel laureate.

The original version is false. The region's first Nobel was Carlos Saavedra Lamas, Argentine, Nobel Peace Prize in 1936, nine years before Mistral. She is Latin America's first in Literature, which is a different fact and still enormous. One word was enough to move the sentence from false to true, and that word came from the filter, not from me.

The uncomfortable part: the false sentence was a better hook than the true one. That is the kind of decision where the method earns its keep.

I published 99 facts in the Passport without a single source, and handed them out in a PDF too.

I wrote them in July to fill the entries, and they were marked as verified without being so. Checked against the usual rule, several were false (the cases below) and others had nothing to stand on: the internet vote that made Torres del Paine the eighth wonder of the world, the species Darwin supposedly described at La Campana, the glacier and the 50 km of Río de los Cipreses, the 8,000 years of Pali Aike and the closeness of Río Clarillo, which came from a tourism blog. Whatever could not be backed by a specific document came off the page.

What I learned: a trivia fact is still a fact. Without a source it does not get published, however short and obvious it sounds.

I made a Chilean park Argentine.

Karukinka is a private Chilean park, in our own Tierra del Fuego, run by the Wildlife Conservation Society. Yendegaia’s Argentine neighbor is Tierra del Fuego National Park, according to the foundation that donated the land; the founding decree says it borders Argentina to the east.

I said a community owned the moai. It does not: it runs the park.

The State handed the Rapa Nui people the administration of the park for 50 renewable years, and the National Monuments Law makes archaeological monuments State property. The Spanish version said “owner”; the English one said something else, “guardians”, so the two versions did not even match. Also, in Rapa Nui moai takes no s.

I wrote “the only place on Earth” and it was not.

A 2013 study in Avian Conservation and Ecology counts three mixed colonies of these two species; Puñihuil is the largest, not the only one. And the Isla Cachagua entry, in the same Passport, claimed something similar: two “onlys” contradicting each other on my own site.

I credited Isla Cachagua with a species that no longer nests there, and asked people to stamp it.

CONAF records a Humboldt penguin colony on the island. The Magellanic penguin appears in the literature only as a past nesting site (Simeone et al., Revista Chilena de Historia Natural, 2003). On top of that, the “Monument collector” achievement required a stamp on an island where landing is forbidden. It no longer does.

The same entry gave two different areas for the same park.

According to the decree that created the park, the 407,625 hectares are the whole donation, split between Los Lagos, Aysén and Magallanes. Pumalín got 293,338; the rest of its 402,392 hectares is State land. And “the largest private land donation to a country” is what the donor foundation says about itself, not an independent source.

I added “and South America’s” to a record that is only Chile’s.

Argentina created the Parque Nacional del Sud, today Nahuel Huapi, in 1922, four years earlier. The Chile part is backed by CONAF; the South America part was backed by nobody.

I placed in the park a find that Argentina records on its side.

The sanctuary is on the summit, where the border with Argentina runs. Argentina records the 1999 find in Salta, where the mummies are kept, at the Museum of High Mountain Archaeology. The Spanish sentence also had a grammatical agreement error.

I put the park at the foot of a volcano that lies outside it.

According to CONAF, the park’s highest point is the Portezuelo, at 5,440 m: Ojos del Salado lies outside. And the record I gave the volcano was not backed by any source I had read.

I gave a Chilean bird the scientific name of an Old World one.

Sternula albifrons is the little tern, a bird of Europe, Asia and Africa. Our gaviotín chico is Sternula lorata, listed as Endangered in Chile. The wrong name is on CONAF’s page for Morro Moreno National Park, and I copied it without checking it against a taxonomic source.

I called something that only counted areas “% of Chile”.

The percentage was the number of stamped areas out of 106. A 9-hectare monument counted the same as a 3.5-million-hectare park: it did not measure territory, and calling it “% of Chile” was a made-up fact dressed as a number.