credence
A gap you leave gets filled by the reader
Omitting a figure does not leave a blank. It delegates the figure.
Four instances on one site, in three days:
- a count never stated
- Two readers guessed it; one was wrong.
- a contested total
- Correctly hedged, because the page said so.
- a valuation with no basis
- A reader invented an arbitrary baseline.
- a sentence with no verb
- A model borrowed one from two sentences away, and reported the site as having "built" something it had only collected.
Every number the page did publish was reported accurately. The errors were all in the spaces between them.
Fill the slots that matter, and where a figure is genuinely a judgement call rather than a fact, leave it out deliberately and expect to be misquoted occasionally. That is a real trade, not an oversight.