A calendar comment that said more than the sources did

The kokkekunst.no site has a championship calendar that lists Norwegian cooking competitions and their dates. On 24 September 2026 we added four new entries. The same commit also fixed two factual errors in a comment in the calendar. Claude had written both of them.

This post covers what the comment said, why it was wrong and the rule we took from it. All of it comes from one commit. That commit is the only source, so the post stays close to what it says.

What the comment claimed

The commit message lists both errors:

Kommentaren påsto at Årets kokk hadde fått tretrinnsform (det var NM i kokkekunst) og at Danmark er Michelin-vert i 2027 (ikke kunngjort).

In English: “The comment claimed that Årets kokk had moved to a three-stage format (it was NM i kokkekunst) and that Denmark is the Michelin host in 2027 (not announced).”

The two errors are different kinds of mistake.

The wrong competition. According to the commit, the three-stage format belonged to NM i kokkekunst, not to Årets kokk. The comment put it on the wrong competition.

A claim with no source. The comment said Denmark is the Michelin host in 2027. This had not been announced, so no source could support it. The claim was stated as fact even though it had not been announced.

Code comments, commit messages and docs in our repositories are written by Claude. Henning writes no code. So the comment and both errors in it are Claude’s. The material does not say how the claims ended up in the comment. Writing from memory instead of from a page that was open at the time fits the pattern, but the commit does not say it, so we only note it as a possibility.

How we found it

The commit does not describe a separate investigation, and it does not say how the errors were discovered. The fixes went into the same commit as ordinary work: adding new entries to the calendar.

The commit message says how those entries were checked:

Hver dato er lest på arrangørens egen side 2026-09-24

“Every date was read on the organiser’s own page, 24 September 2026.” The four entries it added:

• Nasjonal Kokkekonkurranse (Chaîne des Rôtisseurs), 24 October 2026
• NM Community Catering (NKL), 16 February 2027
• Årets grønne kokk (Opplysningskontoret for frukt og grønt), 17 February 2027
• Skole-NM, 12–16 April 2027

The fix went into the same commit as the new entries.

The Skole-NM entry shows the other half of the method. The commit marks the date as “planlegges” (being planned), and records that the entry’s note says so too:

Skole-NM 12.–16. april 2027 — «planlegges», og merknaden sier det

So the entry is no more certain than its source. A planned date is shown as a planned date, not as a fixed one. The Michelin claim did the opposite: it turned something that had not been announced into a fact.

Why a comment matters

It would be easy to wave this off. It was a comment, not a date shown to readers. But if the comment says Årets kokk has three stages, that could become the starting point for the next edit. If it says Denmark hosts Michelin in 2027, someone may turn it into a news item or a calendar entry. An unsourced claim in a comment is an unchecked fact waiting for a reader.

The commit does not say whether either claim ever reached the published site. We don’t know, so we are not claiming it either way.

What the fix looked like

The fix was simple:

• The commit fixed the claim about the three-stage format, which belonged to NM i kokkekunst, not Årets kokk.
• The commit fixed the Michelin 2027 claim, which had not been announced.
• The four new entries were added, each with its date checked against the organiser’s own page on the same day.
• The uncertain date (Skole-NM) carries a note saying it is still being planned.

The commit message does not show the new wording of the comment.

What we don’t know

We want to be careful here, because this post exists to keep claims within what the sources support:

• One commit documents this. We are not claiming Claude makes this kind of error in general, and we are not claiming it never happens elsewhere. It happened here, twice, in one comment.
• The commit does not say when the comment was first written or how long it sat in the repository.
• The commit does not say whether a reader ever saw either claim.

The rule

Every factual claim is checked against the primary source, and comments are no exception. That means the organiser’s own page for dates and formats, and an official announcement for who hosts what. Nothing is written from memory. If the source says “planned”, the text says planned. If there is no source, the claim stays out.