Nothing here has passed the person-checks yet

There are eight lessons on this site and not one of them has passed the six checks that need a person.

Every lesson page says so, at the top, in a box you cannot miss. The time estimate says PLANNED, NOT YET MEASURED. The check block says which boxes are unticked. That is deliberate and it is not modesty.

What the claim actually commits to

"Checked by a person" means five things, and it is worth being exact because a claim that turns out to be soft is worse than no claim at all.

• Somebody has performed every step described, on a real machine, and watched what happened.
• Somebody has checked every factual claim against a primary source, and every source is listed.
• Somebody has timed the lesson with a stopwatch and published the number they got.
• Somebody is accountable — there is an address, a person reads it, and corrections get published rather than edited in quietly.
• Somebody's judgement decided what went in and what was cut.

None of the eight has met all five. The steps were drafted rather than performed. The times are planned rather than measured. The failures in the 'if it goes wrong' sections are the likely ones rather than the ones that were actually hit.

Why publish at all, then

Two options were available. Hold everything back until it is all done, and have nothing to show for months. Or publish with the gap marked, so anybody reading can see exactly what state it is in.

The second one is more useful and it is also more honest. A draft lesson that says it is a draft is worth more than a finished-looking one that quietly is not.

What happens next

Each lesson gets performed end to end, on a normal machine, at the pace of somebody meeting it for the first time. The planned minutes get replaced with the measured ones. The real failures replace the imagined ones. Then the draft block comes off, one lesson at a time.

This post stays up afterwards, at this address, with a note. It is a better record than deleting it would be.