My progress was 0.5% or 7.3%, depending on which denominator the report used

A classification pass over a large corpus prints its progress. Here are two numbers from the same run, in the same line: judged=8/1601 judged_atoms=4569/62613 Eight of sixteen hundred. Four and a half thousand of sixty-two thousand. Both are "how much have we judged", both are correct, and they are not the same question. The first counts files . The second counts items inside files . Eight files is half a percent of the files, and those eight files happened to be dense, so they carry 4,569 items. Quote either number and you have said something true and given a completely different impression. The number I wanted to quote The first one, obviously. 8/1601 sounds like early days and sets expectations low. 4569/62613 sounds like seven percent, which sounds like a slog. Neither is the honest headline, because the honest headline has to say what a unit is before it says how many there are. The line now carries both, with different names, and nothing in the project is allowed to say "judged" without one of those two words attached. label unit value what it answers judged files 8/1601 how many documents have been through the pass judged_atoms items 4569/62613 how much of the corpus that represents The line that makes the rest of it checkable The same output carries a breakdown: top=1172 bot=69 classed=3328 unjudged=58044 classes=business_face:165, gui:1348, needs_owner:47, no_referent:519, outside_backend:1201, pointer_only:48 and one thing that is not a count: top + bot + classed + unjudged = atoms (refused when it does not hold) That identity is the only reason any of the numbers above are worth reading. A breakdown that does not sum to the total is the most ordinary defect a classification report can have, and it is invisible: every individual category was computed correctly, one path just never assigned anything, or assigned twice. The reader sees six plausible numbers and no way to tell. Printing the sum, and failing the run when it is wrong , converts that from someth