We messed up with the Windows 12 article. What we got wrong and how it happened

Earlier this week, PCWorld published a summary of Windows 12 rumors translated from PCWelt that do not meet our editorial standards. We are deeply embarrassed by this and I personally apologize for publishing the article. It shouldn’t have been, but we’re keeping the article online (with an editor’s note at the top) so that it remains in the public domain.

Windows Central posted a response detailing its errors. Thanks for holding us accountable, guys – sincerely. In the same spirit of accountability, I want to explain how this happened and what we are doing to ensure an error like this doesn’t happen again.

Let’s start by discussing how PCWorld handles translated articles, and then I’ll address issues with the article itself.

Translations

PCWorld is part of a group of technology-focused websites that includes Macworld in the United States, as well as European sites like PCWelt (Germany) and PC for Alla (Sweden). We all use the same content management system and can easily publish DeepL-translated English versions of German and Swedish content. This allows PCWorld to publish stories written by PCWelt in English within minutes, and vice versa.

Windows Central and others have questioned whether this article was written by AI. The author says no. However, it should be noted that DeepL uses AI for translation.

As part of our post-mortem on the evolution of this article, PCWelt’s editor-in-chief pointed out that the translation makes the article sound more definitive than its native German. He says that in the context of the article, the German word “soll” signals a rumored expectation, but the English translation uses “will” instead of something more like “is rumored to.”

This reveals a weakness in our publishing process and we will be more vigilant about translated wording in the future.

How this article got published on PCWorld

We generally give translated articles a lighter edit and focus mainly on voice and structure. We place great trust in the judgment of our sister editorial teams. Nonetheless, the poor supply discussed in this article should have been identified and raised as an issue by PCWorld’s US-based staff. Unfortunately, this issue was not raised due to a number of communication issues. To be clear, this is an explanation, not an excuse – we are responsible for our mistakes here.

We launched translation capabilities in 2023. Since then, I have been the person who identifies German and Swedish articles that are extracted. That changed two weeks ago, when I turned this process over to a group of other staff.

I won’t go into all the details, but the team thought I had approved this article on Windows 12, when that was not the case. They agree that the lack of sourcing should have set off their own editorial sensors, and that that alone should have caused them to save the article for a follow-up conversation. It was a failure to plan this post without checking with me first.

But most importantly, I was on personal leave from last Wednesday until Tuesday, and I was virtually unable to communicate. Questionable items are usually reported to me for inspection, but I wasn’t there.

As editor-in-chief, I’m the last line of defense on PCWorld. I schedule our main stories for the next day and give each one a thorough read to make sure it meets our standards. But the system collapsed in this matter.

Again, this is an explanation, not an excuse. This story should never have been published on PCWorld and I’m sorry I did.

Going forward, I will clearly communicate the responsibilities of each role to all staff and have reminded our editorial team that potentially problematic articles always must be transmitted to senior management before being posted online. If I’m not there, they’ll report our editorial director, Jon Phillips. Assumptions are not enough.

The problems with Windows 12 history

Finally, the elephant in the room – the story itself.

I don’t lead the PCWelt editorial team, only the PCWorld editorial team, but I want to explain why this particular Windows 12 article does not meet PCWorld’s editorial standards. We promise to leave it live on the site for posterity – we earned it, we’ll eat it, we’re sorry – and we’ll link to this explanation above. Here is a link to the original German version, which has since been updated.

The first version included no source links or attribution beyond the introduction and was written in a way that suggested it was original reporting. This was not the case. This is obviously bad and should have prevented publication on PCWorld until someone raised concerns.

PCWorld staff noticed its issues Monday afternoon, before Windows Central’s response was posted, and we asked PCWelt to provide the origin of the complaints. PCWelt added the sourcing to its article Tuesday morning, and we also added them to PCWorld’s version.

This sourcing was not sufficient and actually casts further doubt on the article.

The author of PCWelt linked to many sites of dubious quality. One of them links to a forum comment generated by ChatGPT, published the same day as our Windows 12 roundup, which clearly uses our erroneous report as its source. Other links that the author claimed as sources were published after the original PCWelt article went live. I do not trust the validity of these claimed sources or that they were actually used to research this article.

Several elements of this Windows 12 rumor included old and invalid information, such as references to a CorePC initiative, “Hudson Valley,” and UI claims based on old information. Once again, Windows Central has done a terribly wonderful job of listing all of its flaws.

My pledge here: PCWorld will apply much more scrutiny to translated articles in the future. We will carefully review sourcing, analysis and translations. We will ensure that the same level of questioning that we apply to English assignments is applied to all content.

A breakdown like this is deeply embarrassing and can’t happen twice. We will treat all translations as a “fresh” editorial requiring a complete top-to-bottom review. PCWorld will also no longer translate articles from the author of the PCWelt Windows 12 article.

Conclusion

We messed up. We are sorry. I am Sorry.

PCWorld is better than that. Most of our staff have been journalists for more than a decade. We put serious effort and resources into bringing you good information backed by veteran experience and original reporting. Every member of PCWorld is here because we’re geeks ourselves. We care and take great pride in maintaining editorial standards.

We appreciate your trust – witness how we literally “eat our words” every year on The Full Nerd podcast, holding ourselves accountable for past predictions gone wrong. It’s been a painful few days for everyone at PCWorld, but I hope the transparency in this postmortem will begin to rebuild the trust we lost by publishing this mess.

We made a mistake. A bad one. This won’t happen again. The PCWorld core team will continue to bring you the same news and analysis that we have provided for over 40 years at this point, and I am confident that we will be able to earn back your trust in the future.

~Brad