ExpatFYI has a verification-status page. It's a genuinely good idea — a public, dated record of which content has actually been checked against primary sources. At one point it stated plainly that every tracked page had completed verification. Zero pending.
I checked one page directly. It wasn't true.
What I actually found
A comparison page — visa requirements across Portugal, Spain, and Mexico — had every number filled in correctly. Income thresholds, processing times, validity periods, all specific, all real. But the Verdict row, the actual synthesis a reader came for, still read as raw placeholder text. Something like "write the verdict once figures are confirmed" — sitting there, live, on a page the status system had already marked complete.
The data was real. The conclusion nobody had actually written yet.
I checked back on it three separate times over the following weeks. Same unfixed text, every time.
Why this mattered more than a typo
A missing sentence isn't a big technical problem. What made it worth writing about is the gap it revealed between a status system and reality. "356 pages verified, zero pending" is a comforting number to look at. It's also exactly the kind of claim that stops getting checked once it exists, because the dashboard already agrees with itself.
I don't think the verification system is fake — most of what I checked around it was genuinely solid, real sourcing, real dates, real corrections logged. But a system that tracks whether data was checked isn't the same as a system that checks whether old scaffolding text got cleaned out. Those are different questions, and only one of them was actually being asked.
What actually changed
I stopped trusting "verified" as a status and started treating it as a claim to spot-check, the same way I'd treat any other number someone hands me. Not because the team building it was being dishonest — because a dashboard that agrees with itself is exactly the kind of thing that needs an outside check most, precisely when it looks most finished.