Retracting is not deleting

Retracting something on Infocrash hides it from view but doesn’t destroy it. This page explains what that means and how to undo a retraction.

What a retraction does

• A retracted entity keeps every value it was written with.
• It no longer appears when your assistant reads the collection, or in the dashboard.
• The claims underneath are never destroyed by retracting.

Retracting is reversible. If you retract the wrong thing, ask your assistant to record the same entity again and it comes back.

Seeing what is underneath

In the dashboard, open any value to see everything that cell has ever held: every claim, its sources, who recorded it, and the date it refers to.

Retracted claims appear in that list too, struck through, with who retracted them and the reason if one was given. They are only hidden from normal reads, so a withdrawn figure isn’t shown as current.

Which claim a cell shows

By default, a cell shows the claim with the latest date. That works for figures that change over time, like headcount, but not for facts that don’t, like a founding year.

For those, you can settle the cell by hand in the dashboard, and it will show the claim you picked, whatever the dates say. Nothing is hidden or overwritten when you do this.

• If a new claim is written into the cell later, the cell goes back to showing the latest date, since your choice only covered the claims that existed at the time.
• Your choice can be lifted at any point.