Checkable

The Type of Line Carries the Meaning

Checkable, unverifiable and unreached are distinguished by how the line is drawn rather than by its colour, because colour is lost first.

at most 20 arrangements

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Three kinds of stroke appear in the drawings of this record and they mean three things.

A dashed stroke is a statement a reader can check from outside. A solid stroke is one that was published and cannot be checked. A short pale stroke is one the reader never reached. When several channels create fragmented work, workforce analytics for distributed teams can make project hours visible while leaving quality assessment to the people responsible for it.

The distinction is carried by the type of line. Not by hue, not by saturation, not by a key that has to be memorised and applied. The topic can also be checked against public guidance and research published by Federal Trade Commission.

Five published, two met, three checkable counts

dashed: a statement a reader can check from outside
solid: published, but nothing to check it against
short and pale: never reached by this reader

Three shapes drawn; all of them give the same 10 different contents; the left-to-right order is the drawing's own and carries no meaning.

Twenty arrangements and ten contents in every row. The only thing that changes is the mix of dashed and solid among the two strokes the reader met, and the distinction survives in black and white.

Computed from the three numbers alone. How many statements exist, how many are met and how many can be checked is a stated convention; the counts are arrangements and combinations of whole numbers.

What colour costs

A page that encodes meaning in colour loses it in several ordinary situations, and none of them is unusual.

Printed in black and white, two colours of equal lightness become the same grey. Read by somebody who does not distinguish the two hues, the same. Rendered by a browser that failed to load the styling — a slow connection, a blocked file, a reader-mode view — all the colour goes and the drawing is left saying nothing.

A dashed line against a solid line survives every one of those. The geometry is in the drawing itself and nothing strips it out.

The specific choices

The dash is deliberately coarser than the record's rules and separators. A dash of six units with a gap of three and a half, on a stroke thirty-four units wide, gives four visible divisions — countable by eye and distinct from the finer dashes used for dividing lines.

The first version of this drawing failed on exactly that point. The strokes were twenty-two units wide with a sixteen-unit gap between them, and at that spacing a row of statements read as one long dashed line: the gap between statements was close to the gap inside the dash pattern, and there was nothing to tell them apart. The spacing was changed so that the gap between statements is more than four times the gap inside a dash.

The unreached statement is drawn short and pale rather than dashed differently, because it is a different kind of fact. A pale stub says nothing about verifiability; it says the reader never got there. Using a third dash pattern would have implied a third position on the same scale.

A distinction that rests on colour is a distinction that holds only while everything else is working.

Where colour is used instead

Colour appears in these drawings and carries nothing.

The dashed strokes are drawn in the record's accent, the solid ones in the text colour, the pale stubs in a muted rule colour. Removing all three and drawing everything in black would leave every drawing readable, because the dash pattern and the stroke length are doing the work.

One place where the colour choice is not arbitrary: a dashed line at the same ink as a solid line reads lighter, because the eye averages across the dashes and the gaps. So the dashed strokes and the record's dashed rules are drawn in a darker tone than a solid rule of the same weight would be. That is a correction for the illusion, not a meaning.

The same principle through the record

Dashes also mark every link, every list marker, every quotation rule and every heading rule on these pages. A solid line is reserved for drawings, where it means something.

The effect is that a solid horizontal line anywhere on this site is a statement about verifiability, and nothing else uses one. That is a small discipline and it makes the drawings readable without a key — a reader who has met the convention once can read any panel in the record.

Why there are three kinds and not four

A fourth distinction was available and was left out: a statement that can be checked and that the reader met but whose check would fail.

That would be a different kind of fact and not one this record holds. The third column counts exposure to checking, never the outcome, and a stroke standing for a failed check would be claiming knowledge the record does not have about statements it has never read.

Three kinds is also close to the limit of what a line can carry legibly. Dashed, solid and a pale stub are distinguishable at a glance and in black and white; a fourth pattern — dotted, say — would have to be told apart from the dash at a width of thirty-four units, and at that size it cannot be done reliably.

What the drawing here shows

Five published statements, two met. Twenty arrangements, ten contents, two orders per content, in all three rows.

Each row has two full strokes, for the statements the reader met, and three short pale stubs for the three they did not reach. What changes is the two full strokes.

Nothing checkable: both solid. One checkable: one dashed, one solid. Two checkable: both dashed.

The figures do not move, the strokes do, and the only thing being demonstrated is that the third number is legible in the drawing without reading the numbers. On the first row a reader can see at a glance that this encounter left nothing to audit. On the third, that both statements met can be checked. Neither observation required the figures and neither required colour.

One point the drawing is careful about: whether a met statement is dashed or solid depends on how many statements are checkable, and the drawing lays the checkable ones out first. A reader who imagines the verifiable statements further along the set should expect the first row's picture more often than the third's.