humancheckable

Humancheckable is an adjective used to describe information, criteria, procedures, or outputs that can be verified or assessed by a person with access to appropriate evidence. The term combines "human" and "checkable" to emphasize that verification depends on human judgment rather than solely on automated checks. It is often used in discussions of data quality, governance, and system design to distinguish human review requirements from machine-checkable constraints.

In practice, a process or artifact is called humancheckable when a reasonable person, given the relevant documents, can determine whether it complies with stated standards. This may involve inspecting logs, examining materials, or conducting interviews. Humancheckable verification is typically contrasted with machine-checkable or automated checks, which rely on predefined rules or algorithms and may not capture nuance or ambiguity.

Applications include content moderation workflows that require human judgment; regulatory compliance where human reviewers assess risk; data labeling processes where experts verify annotations; and software release gates where human approval is required for certain changes.

Limitations include scalability, potential subjectivity, and inconsistency across reviewers. In practice, organizations often combine humancheckable review with automated checks to improve reliability, transparency, and audibility. Related concepts include explainability, verifiability, reproducibility, and auditability.