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A Daily Lexicon of Trustworthy Data

005·76

staleness

/ˈsteɪl.nəs/ - n.

1 [colloq.] The state a dashboard reaches quietly, while still rendering its last good number with full confidence.Keep. Punchy.This is the problem.

Working definition

2. The condition of data that has aged past its acceptable freshness window and may no longer reflect the current state of the world.

Evidence

Seen in the wild · 4

We Bought Active Metadata to Avoid Deciding Who Owns the DataShiny Object Pursuit
Your Pipeline Learned to Call Yesterday's Breakage NormalDefinition Drift
Data observability raised a fortune to watch the number. Defining the number raised nothing.Process Debt
Retrieval-augmented generation is a data-quality project nobody scoped.Business Sense Required

See also

data downtimeThe hours the data was wrong, billed entirely to whoever used it, not whoever produced it.
freshnessHow recently the pipeline ran, which is not the same as how recently it was right.
timelinessThe window between when the data was right and when anyone looked at it.