Chapter 35 · The Staff
Running a Fact-Check
The fact-checker reads a document, pulls out every statement it makes about the real world, goes and looks each one up, and hands back only the ones that turned out to be wrong. This chapter covers pressing the button and everything up to the moment the findings arrive. Reading the findings themselves is the next chapter's job.
Starting a check
Open the document, choose the Review tab on the ribbon, and press Check Facts, the highlighted button with the shield. The findings rail on the right switches to its Facts tab and a spinner appears.
Before anything is sent, Storskarvia finishes saving your last change. The check runs on the server's copy of the document, so a paragraph still in flight would otherwise be missing from the check you paid for. If that save cannot get through, the check is refused with "Your last change has not reached the server, so this check would run on an older draft. Not run." Nothing is charged. Once the storage chip in the status bar settles, press the button again.
The button belongs to the document's owner. Reviewers and editors you have shared a document with do not see Check Facts or Continuity at all, because every check is paid for from the owner's allowance.
What it reads, and what it ignores
It reads the whole document, as it currently reads. Text you have struck through as a pending suggestion is left out, so the checker never argues with a line you have already cut.
From that text it extracts claims about the real world:
| Checked | Left alone |
|---|---|
| Dates, and who did what when | Plot events |
| Attributions: who said, wrote or invented something | Invented people and places |
| Statistics, prices, distances, counts | Opinions and judgements |
| Brands, products, technology, media | A character's hopes or predictions |
| Period detail: whether a thing existed yet | Your prose, in any respect |
For fiction, the useful question is usually whether a detail fits the time the story is set in. The checker is told to phrase each claim against the period your pages establish, so "she dialled the toll-free number" in a scene dated 1962 becomes a checkable statement about 1962. It can only do that if the date is somewhere in the text. A year in a scene heading, a chapter title or the opening paragraph is enough.
It is also told to let a round number within roughly fifteen per cent of the real figure go.
One check examines at most 150 claims. A document dense enough to exceed that gets the first 150 in reading order, and the Facts tab says so above the results: "Checked the first 150 of 212 claims found." Claims after that point were not looked at.
Where the evidence comes from
Each claim is looked up in Wikipedia, both the article summaries and the body text further down the page, and in two separate web searches. When fewer than two independent websites back the claim up, Storskarvia buys one more search from a paid provider before judging it. Two pages on the same site count as one source.
A judge then weighs each claim against that evidence alone. A claim judged wrong or misleading goes to a second reviewer, the Skeptic, whose only job is to argue that your manuscript was right. A finding reaches you only if it survives that argument.
Confidence follows the evidence. Eighty per cent or more needs two independent sources, a single source caps it at seventy, and conflicting sources cap it at fifty. When the explanation quotes a figure that none of the retrieved sources contains, the confidence is halved and a note says the figure could not be confirmed.
How long it takes
There is no fixed time. The spinner says it is reading your draft while claims are being extracted, then switches to a count, "42 claims under review". The wait grows with the number of claims, since each one takes several lookups: a scene with three dates is quick, a research-heavy historical chapter is not.
You can keep writing while it runs. The check reads the draft as it stood when you pressed the button, so anything you type afterwards is not part of it.
You can also leave. The check carries on at Storskarvia's end, and the next time you open the document the Facts tab picks up the latest fact check, still spinning if it has not finished. If the page loses touch with a running check, it tells you: "Lost contact with that check. It may still be running on the server: reload the page to pick it up."
When it finishes
Findings arrive as cards in the Facts tab, and the number beside the tab name counts the ones still open. A clean document gets one line, "No issues found in 38 checked claims." There is no praise and no summary of what went well.
Two notes can appear above the results, and both matter most when the result is clean:
- Weaker sourcing than usual. Web search came back empty for a quarter or more of the claims, so those were checked against Wikipedia alone, or half or more could only be confirmed by a single site. Treat low-confidence findings, and the absence of findings, as unconfirmed.
- Checked the first 150 of… The claim cap described above.
Running a new check replaces what the Facts tab shows. Continuity findings live in their own tab, so neither kind of check clears the other.
What it costs
A check is charged by the length of the text it reads: one check per 10,000 words, rounded up. The charge is taken when the check starts.
| Document | Checks used |
|---|---|
| A 6,000-word chapter | 1 |
| A 24,000-word script | 3 |
| A 100,000-word novel | 10 |
The allowance is 20 a month on Free, 1,000 on Pro and 5,000 on Studio. It renews every 30 days, counted from your own start date rather than the first of the month. Fact-checks share that pool with continuity passes, research questions and filling the Story Bible from a draft. Your Studio page shows the running total, for example FREE PLAN · 3/20 fact-checks used this month, and that figure includes the other three.
The monthly allowance is spent first. Prepaid checks, bought in packs of 50 for $5 or 200 for $15, cover whatever runs past it. They do not expire and the monthly renewal does not touch them. When your allowance is gone, the Studio page offers the packs.
A check that fails shows "Check failed" with the reason, and the checks it cost are given back.
When a check will not start
The reason appears in the Facts tab where the spinner would be.
| You see | What it means |
|---|---|
| "Nothing to check yet" | The document is under fifteen characters. One sentence with a fact in it is enough. |
| "Please verify your email first" | Every metered action waits for a verified address. Use the link in the email, or resend it from your Studio page. |
| "Two checks are already running" | Your account runs two at a time, fact-checks and continuity passes together, across every document. Wait for one to finish. |
| "You've used all 20 fact-checks on the free plan this month" | The whole check does not fit in what is left. A long document adds "This document is long, so it counts as 3 checks." Nothing is charged, and a check never runs in part. |
| "Your last change has not reached the server" | See Starting a check. |
The allowance row catches people with a long document and a few checks left: two remaining will not run a 25,000-word script that needs three.
What leaves the building
To do the work, the text of the document goes to the language model that reads it, and short search queries built from each claim go to Wikipedia and to web search services. Storskarvia caches search results to speed up re-checks, and stores the queries only as keyed fingerprints, never as the words themselves. Documents set to zero retention can be checked as normal: the text is fetched from your storage for the check and not kept.
The fact-checker reads and reports. It never rewrites the sentence it flags, and Chapter 1 explains why that line holds for the whole staff. Allowances, plans and billing are covered in full in Part IX.
Updated 2026-09-11 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?