Where did that number come from? An open register of factual claims
We publish Fact Provenance under its own name. It is an open index of factual claims and where they came from: where a claim first appeared, who repeated it, and when. It does not say whether a claim is true. The register is live at factprovenance.org.
The problem it addresses
Almost every number online has been copied more often than it has been checked. Few of the copies say where the number came from. So the question people actually ask, "who started this?", has no answer. Blame lands nowhere, or on whoever repeated the claim last.
What the register holds
- 1,465 claims from 16 source domains, crawled from September 2026.
- 1,174 public and 291 withheld on licence grounds.
- 1,161 distinct assertions across 1,418 content-addressed records.
- 64 corroborated assertions, carried by more than one independent source.
- 207 page digests, each a fingerprint of the exact bytes that were read.
Every record carries the licence it was published under and the date it was read. Each claim is meant to show an origin line, the earliest record we hold, and a propagation list, everyone who repeated it in order.
What it refuses to do
It does not decide what is true. "This started here and was copied nineteen times" is checkable. "This is misinformation" is an opinion, and an opinion starts an argument. The register publishes the first and declines the second. That boundary sits on every claim page, not in a footnote.
The identity layer
A record that can be edited afterwards carries no attribution. Claims are identified by their content instead: a canonicalised digest, versioned as fp1, with a Merkle commitment over the set. On the real data the root verified with 11-hash inclusion proofs. A named source can re-check its own entry offline, without trusting us.
What is not ready
The origin and propagation views are computed from data the register already holds, and nothing on the site shows them yet, so today it cannot answer the question the project exists to answer. "first seen" means first seen by us, inside a small window. Coverage is narrow: 16 domains, mostly Irish and European.
The strategy, the phases, the licensing posture and the risks are public. Read the plan, or open the register at factprovenance.org. If you publish claims and want to know where your version came from, say hello.