part of: the tour · chapter 1 of 12
What this site is
Eight ideas that explain every screen here. Read this chapter and the rest are variations.
Everything is a claim
A reported fact and a speculative theory are the same kind of object here: a claim, with its own page, its own sources, and its own standing. Nothing is filed as “background” or “allegation” — the difference between them is how much bears on them, and that is shown rather than asserted.
Why The moment a system has one bin for facts and another for theories, somebody has to decide which bin a new statement goes in — and that decision, made early and invisibly, is where most of the judgement in news actually happens. Here there is no such decision to make.
Connects It is why an unproven hypothesis can sit on the same page as a physical trace without either being flattered: they are both claims, and the evidence around them is what differs.
See it live A claim page, with everything that bears on it
Belief is computed, never assigned
No one types a score into this system. Every percentage you see is recomputed from the graph of support and challenge around a claim, and you can take any of them apart term by term.
Why A number somebody typed can be argued with only by arguing with the person. A number that is the output of a stated procedure over stated inputs can be checked — and if you disagree, you can point at exactly which term you disagree with.
Connects Adding evidence adds a link; it never edits a score. That is why the change log records connections rather than corrections, and why the claim page can show its own arithmetic.
See it live The arithmetic, in reader language · The same arithmetic on a real claim
“None of the above” is always on the ballot
Every open Question carries an explicit share for the possibility that none of the listed answers is right. It is drawn last, hatched, and labelled unknown — none of the above, and it is frequently the largest bar on the page.
Why A list of candidate answers with the shares adding to 100% quietly asserts that the true answer is on the list. Early in a real story it usually is not. The unknown bar is where that possibility lives, and it is why this site can be honest about a story it has barely begun to read.
Connects The residual is a contender in the ranking too: a Question the fog is winning is treated as a live Question, not a dormant one.
See it live A live split with its unknown share · Why the residual exists
Repetition is not evidence
When forty outlets run the same wire story, the model records forty restatements of one assertion and gives them the weight of one. Restatements are shown — who repeated what, at what remove — and they move nothing.
Why Volume is the easiest thing in the world to manufacture and the thing most news interfaces are most sensitive to. Making repetition structurally visible and numerically inert is the single most important defence this design has.
Connects The same rule governs attention: the front page ranks by evidence-shaped activity, and a restatement storm produces exactly zero of it.
See it live The rule · How it shapes the front page · A document, and what restates it
Nothing is deleted — a losing branch goes grey, not away
A hypothesis the evidence has abandoned is rendered dormant: greyed, at the belief floor, still on the page with everything that argued for and against it. Combinations ruled out as impossible are recorded as impossible and still shown when you try to walk them.
Why The reason something was dropped is part of the record, and a story that quietly loses its early theories teaches nobody anything about how it developed. It also means you can check whether a discarded theory was discarded for a reason.
Connects It is why the explorer will still assemble a world you have made impossible, and explain the impossibility instead of blocking the click.
See it live Dormant branches, still on the page · Nothing is deleted
Two clocks: when it happened, and when we learned it
Every assertion carries an event time and a knowledge time. Pages show both, and adding ?asof=YYYY-MM-DD to any URL renders the model as it stood on that day.
Why The gap between the two is the fog of war, and it is content. Watching a story’s confidence form — or fail to — is only possible if the record remembers what it believed before it knew better.
Connects The timeline view puts the event-time axis on screen and the knowledge-time scrubber on top of it; the change log is the same two clocks read as a stream.
See it live The two clocks · Scrub this Question back a day
Many narratives at once — and none of them is a folder
A narrative here is a consistent set of choices through the open Questions: pick an answer to each and you have a possible world. Dozens coexist, ranked, and every piece of evidence is shared across all of them rather than filed inside one.
Why Grouping claims into “stories” as containers forces an early commitment about what belongs with what — and that commitment is usually the thing in dispute. Selections avoid it: a claim can matter to several versions of events without being owned by any.
Connects It is why URLs are flat (/claim/…, never /story/…/claim/…) and why the page-to-page navigation is called a context line rather than a breadcrumb trail.
See it live Walk the possible worlds · The explorer, explained
What this is not
Not a fact-checker issuing verdicts, not a consensus meter, and not a publication with a house view. Nothing here is rated true or false by an editor; a number is a projection over evidence under a named lens.
Why The failure mode this whole design guards against is a machine that looks authoritative and is actually just averaging opinion. Saying so plainly, in the interface and not only in the small print, is part of the guard.
Connects Every share on the site names the lens that produced it, so no number can be quoted as “the site’s verdict”. The About page states the same boundary in full.
See it live What it is, and what it is not · Lenses
The shape of the site: six kinds of page
Questions (an open uncertainty and its candidate answers), claims (one statement and its standing), entities (a person, place or organisation), events (something that happened), sources (a document), and stories (a group of Questions that constrain each other). Plus three views keyed to a Question: its timeline, its narrative explorer, and its story.
Why Knowing the six kinds is most of what it takes to navigate here, because every page is one of them and every link goes to one of them.
Connects Everything named anywhere on this site is a link to its own page — chapter 6 is about how strictly that is enforced.
See it live All open questions · An entity · A source document