Risk
Contradiction Surface
Two or more published places that assert incompatible versions of the same fact.
OWNER — Product Marketing
LAST REVIEWED — 2026-09-02 07:11 UTC
What it is
A contradiction surface is two or more published places asserting incompatible versions of the same fact. A pricing page says one number, a sales deck says another, and a help article quotes a third from two years ago. Each was correct when it was written, and none of them is obviously the wrong one to a reader arriving cold.
Why it matters
A contradiction is worse than a single stale page. A retrieval system will cite whichever version it happened to find, so the same question can produce different answers on different days with no error ever being raised. It also breaks the usual fix: correcting one surface leaves the contradiction intact, and often makes it harder to spot, because the loudest wrong version has now been quietly replaced by a quieter one.
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