How to check this record.

The claim is narrow, and worth stating exactly rather than gesturing at:

The files that make up this site existed, in exactly their present form, no later than the dates recorded in the anchor log. Those dates are attested by parties outside this project's control and could not have been backdated.

That is a claim about when, not about whether. It proves a page said what it says by a given date. It does not prove a quotation is accurate — the per-page change logs and the linked originals are what answer that — and it does not prove who wrote it. Those are three separate questions, and running them together would overstate what any timestamp can do.

Why it matters at all: a date a project writes about itself proves nothing, because the project controls it. File dates, commit dates and "last reviewed" lines can all be set to whatever their author likes. An external attestation cannot, which is why this record leans on parties who have no stake in it.

Mechanical fidelity checking. Quotations are verified against captures of the source programmatically, not by eye. A page does not ship if a quotation does not match its capture.

A deploy gate. A single check must pass before anything is published. It verifies every stated institution count, every page's docket rows, the absence of reviewer placeholders, the absence of advisory language, and colour contrast to WCAG 2.1 AA on every token. If it fails, nothing ships.

Archive captures. Sources are captured to the Internet Archive and the capture links recorded on the page, so you can see what a source said on the date it was read. A capture is only ever recorded when the archiver confirmed success and the stored copy played back. Where a source refused the archiver, the page says so, names it, gives the reason, and says whether it is being retried — uncaptured sources are disclosed, not quietly dropped.

External timestamp anchors. Periodically the whole record is hashed into an append-only chain. Each entry contains a hash of every file plus a link to the entry before it, so altering anything in the past breaks every entry that followed. Each entry is then timestamped by two certificate authorities and committed to the Bitcoin blockchain.

The fourth is what turns the first three from assurances into facts you can check.

The evidence is published, not merely described. The anchor log is at anchors/chain.jsonl, and the scheme is documented at anchors/README.md.

The full procedure — one command, then the same check done by hand five ways, then an honest account of the limits — is in the verification runbook. It is written for someone who has no reason to trust us, because that is the only reader worth writing it for.

In outline: hash any page and find that hash in a dated manifest; confirm the manifest's own hash matches the chain entry that records it; walk the chain links to confirm nothing earlier was altered; then verify the entry against either certificate authority's timestamp token, or look up the Bitcoin block the entry was committed to and compare the merkle root in any block explorer.

Resolution is hours, not seconds. Bitcoin block timestamps are supplied by miners within consensus bounds, so a Bitcoin attestation establishes existence before roughly a given hour. That is sufficient for a claim measured in dates. The certificate-authority timestamps are precise to the second, but rest on a certificate authority rather than on proof-of-work — which is why both are used, since they fail in different ways.

The chain begins on August 28, 2026. Its first entry is a backfill: it proves the then-existing pages existed as of that date, not as of the earlier dates recorded inside them. Everything anchored since carries a near-contemporaneous external anchor. Stating this plainly costs nothing and hiding it would be the kind of thing this record exists to make impossible.

Anchors establish existence, not accuracy or authorship. As above. If you think a quotation on this site is wrong, the useful thing is to tell us: hello@gatheredwork.com. Corrections are made as new entries in a page's change log, never by silent edit, and the correction is itself anchored.