What we got wrong, and when we fixed it

Two of our cited pages had been moved by their publishers. Push Square shifted its Extended Look piece from /guides/ to /news/, and Video Games Chronicle moved its Netflix-special roundup from /features/ to /news/. Both old addresses still work — each returns a 301 to the new one — so nothing on the site was broken and no claim changed.

We repointed all thirteen citations anyway. A redirect is a publisher’s promise, not a guarantee: they get dropped in site migrations, and a citation that resolves only through a redirect is one CMS change away from being a dead link with nothing behind it. The point of citing a source is that a reader can go and check it.

This was found by the automated source re-verification pass that now runs weekly over every URL the site cites. Its first full run checked 407 citations across 64 distinct addresses and found no dead sources — these two redirects were the only things needing attention.

What we said. That the Extended Look was the first real gameplay the public had seen “after three trailers and nearly three years of waiting.”

What is right. Two. Trailer 1 landed on 4 December 2023 and Trailer 2 on 6 May 2025. Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look is a roughly half-hour gameplay showcase, not a third trailer, and Rockstar has never released anything branded Trailer 3.

How we know. The official Grand Theft Auto VI site lists exactly those three videos and labels them as such. The sentence now reads “after two trailers”. This is the kind of small compounding error the rest of the field repeats until it becomes received wisdom — “GTA 6 trailer 3” is a heavily searched phrase for a video that does not exist.

What we said. “The Nipper .38 is a small handgun seen repeatedly across GTA 6’s promotional material, including on the cover art in Lucia’s hand” — written as if the in-game name were established.

What is right. The name comes from PC Gamer and nowhere else we can find. GamesRadar+ covers the same Vintage Vice City Pack key art, describes the gun in both protagonists’ hands as a Bersa Thunder 380-inspired pistol, and never uses the word Nipper. Rockstar has not published a name for it.

How we know. Two write-ups of the same image, one naming the weapon and one declining to. The entry keeps the Nipper .38 heading, because that is the name people are searching, but now states in the body that the name rests on a single outlet. One source is enough to publish here; it is not enough to publish silently.

What we said. That Jason’s car was “a two-door coupe from the early trailers”, identified as the Vapid Ganado on outlet reporting.

What is right. Rockstar’s own GTA VI site describes it as “Jason’s well-worn Vapid Ganado low-riding pickup”, parked at Jason’s Safehouse. Pickup, in Rockstar’s words, not coupe in ours.

How we know. The phrase is Rockstar’s, published on the official game site. PC Gamer’s read — a 1970 Ford Ranchero, which is a coupe utility — is not contradicted by that, and both descriptions now sit in the entry instead of one being flattened into the other. Because the name and the description are now Rockstar’s rather than an outlet’s, the entry moved from Credible to Confirmed.

What we said. That “the serial numbers engraved on those variants reference the release dates of GTA: Vice City and Vice City Stories” — PC Gamer’s reading, repeated by us as though it were the reading.

What is right. There is an engraving. What it says is contested. PC Gamer reads the serial numbers as Vice City release dates; GamesRadar+ reads the engravings as the owners’ names, J. Duval and L. Caminos, with a “VC” near the hammer. Rockstar confirms the engraved detailing and does not say what it reads.

How we know. Rockstar’s Ultimate Edition copy names the guns officially — the Hawk & Little Morgan Revolvers, with “classic Vice City stylings sourced from the Vercetti Estate, including palm-tree-etched grips, engraved detailing, and high-performance scope” — and stops there. The entry now carries both outlet readings and Rockstar’s silence on the point. The official naming is why the tier went up to Confirmed at the same time the specific engraving claim came down.

What we said. That Cal “is not currently profiled on Rockstar’s Only in Leonida page, so his details rest on outlet reporting rather than a live official bio.” Tiered Credible on that basis.

What is right. He has an official bio. Rockstar’s Only in Leonida page describes a friend of Jason’s and fellow associate of Brian’s who feels safest at home, listening in on Coast Guard comms with a few beers and some private browser tabs open, and who is — Rockstar’s phrase — “at the low tide of America and happy there”.

How we know. The bio sits on Rockstar’s own character page, which the entry now cites and quotes directly. The original line was a negative assertion about a source that had not been re-checked, which is the easiest kind of error to make and the hardest to notice, because nothing on the page looks wrong. The entry is now tiered Confirmed and quotes Rockstar directly.

What we said. That “the Canis Kamacho, a four-door elongated pickup from GTA Online, returns in GTA 6 and was confirmed via a screenshot of the One-Eyed Willie’s mod shop.” Tiered Credible, on PC Gamer’s identification.

What is right. Nobody outside Rockstar knows which truck it is. PC Gamer reads the screenshot as a returning Kamacho; GamesRadar+ reads the same image as a Canis Mesa “or at least a closely-related model”. Both agree on the Canis badge and both note that the heavy customisation makes a clean identification hard.

How we know. We went back to both pieces and found them describing the same picture and naming different vehicles. Credible means a reputable outlet with sourcing — it does not survive two reputable outlets contradicting each other over a single JPEG. The entry is now tiered Speculation and says plainly that the model is unresolved. We would rather publish a shrug than pick the outlet we happened to read first.

What changed. Every entry in the six databases was re-checked against a wider set of sources on 29 August 2026. Across all six, the source pool went from 12 URLs on 3 domains to 23 URLs on 9, and 38 entries changed confidence tier — 37 upward, one down. Entries tiered Confirmed went from 18 to 46, almost entirely because Rockstar’s own GTA VI site carries the full Ultimate Edition copy, which supplies official names for roughly twenty things that had only ever been named by an outlet.

Why it matters. Before the sweep, a large share of the database ultimately rested on a single publisher. That is a single point of failure dressed up as a citation: if that one write-up is wrong, so are we, everywhere, at once. Two independent sources — different outlets, different domains, not the same story reprinted — is the standard the editorial policy sets, and most entries now meet it.

What it does not mean. More sources did not make anything more certain than its evidence allows. The same sweep produced the Kamacho retraction and two corrections where the extra reading contradicted the first one. Broadening sources is only useful if you are willing to let them tell you that you were wrong.

The disagreement. Rockstar’s own GTA VI site writes “Raul Bautista” in its description of the cover art. PC Gamer’s cast list writes “Batista”. Both spellings are circulating, and a search for the wrong one finds a different set of pages.

What we do. We follow Rockstar. The entry is filed as Raul Bautista, and the divergence is stated on the page rather than quietly resolved, so a reader who arrived from the other spelling knows they are in the right place and knows why the two exist.

Why this is here and not a correction. The database entry has always used Rockstar’s spelling; what changed on 29 August 2026 is that it now cites the official page for it rather than asserting it, and names the outlet that differs. A naming decision that rests on “we checked” and not “here is the page” is the same problem as an unsourced fact, just smaller.

What was wrong. Not a fact — a structure. The type field on locations was free text, so it drifted: 25 entries had accumulated 21 distinct types, 18 of them used exactly once. A filter where almost every option matches one item is not a filter. It looks like a feature and does nothing.

What changed. type, along with the other facet fields across all six databases, is now a fixed list enforced by the content schema. The build fails if an entry uses a value outside it. Locations now sit across 11 types instead of 21, and every option in the filter selects more than a stray singleton.

Why it is in this log. A correction is not only a wrong sentence. A control that quietly stops working is a smaller version of the same failure: the reader sees something presented as usable and cannot tell that it is not. Adding a term to the list is still allowed — deliberately, one at a time, when an entry genuinely does not fit an existing one, rather than by typing whatever came to mind at 1 a.m.