61 lines
4.0 KiB
Markdown
61 lines
4.0 KiB
Markdown
# Quote fidelity against the live articles — 91 entries, 269 excerpts
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**Date:** 2026-09-24 · **By:** Timmy · **Status:** Q3-leftover item closed on the side it could be closed.
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The Q3 audit tested sources resolving and dates agreeing. It did not test whether each magazine entry's
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"verbatim excerpts" actually appear in the article they came from. This does that test, from the outside,
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against the live articles rather than the archive's own captures.
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## Method
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1. Article URLs: the archive's own site map (`MAGAZINE-SITE-MAP.md`, 91 entries) → `recoveries/magazine-article-map.md`,
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every URL fetched, **91/91 return 200**.
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2. Excerpts: the `<blockquote>` elements on each published entry page
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(`/var/www/alexander-whitestone/stackchain/magazine-0NN/index.html`), stripped of tags.
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3. Test: is the excerpt a substring of the fetched article text — (a) strict after whitespace/entity
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normalisation, (b) after also discarding punctuation and inline-markup boundaries
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(`[^a-z0-9]` removed from both sides), which is the honest form when a word can be wrapped in a link or a
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`<sup>`.
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4. Every residual was then re-fetched **sequentially** and inspected by hand, because parallel fetches under load
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returned truncated bodies and produced false misses.
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Script: `quotefidelity.py` / `quotefidelity2.py` (run from a shell on the archive host, output kept at
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`/tmp/quotefidelity2.json` for the run).
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## Result
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| test | excerpts found |
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|---|---|
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| strict substring | 264 / 269 |
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| punctuation- and markup-insensitive | 265 / 269 |
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| after sequential re-fetch of the residuals | **269 / 269** |
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The five strict misses, each resolved by inspection:
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| entry | excerpt | why it did not match strictly |
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|---|---|---|
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| `magazine-033` | "June 4th 2021 – Ron Paul kicks off the bitcoin conference in Miami." | the live page renders the ordinal as `4 th` (`<sup>`) → tag boundary inside a token |
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| `magazine-083` | "This article was written by Grepples, an internet frog selling seeds and member of Stackchain crew." | the byline sits inside an `<a>`; stripping leaves "by Grepples , an" |
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| `magazine-083` | "You can find Grepples on X @15Grepples and on Nostr Grepples@nostr.land." | same byline block, link boundaries |
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| `magazine-084` | "This tutorial was written by HiQ, a memer, DSB bookie and Stackchain Magazine core member." | same byline block, link boundaries |
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| `magazine-089` | "Bitcoin, yes, has won. But Bitcoin culture?" | the live page has "Bitcoin culture ?" — question mark inside a link |
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Four further entries (`003`, `049`, `081`, `089`) were reported missing by the punctuation-insensitive pass and
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were present on sequential re-fetch; the misses were truncated responses under parallel load, not content
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differences. Both passes and the re-fetch are recorded because the false misses are the kind of result that gets
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quietly deleted otherwise.
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## What this settles, and what it does not
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- **Settles:** for all 91 published magazine entries, the quoted excerpts are *in* the live articles. No
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fabricated quotation was found, and no excerpt was found to belong to a different piece.
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- **Does not settle:** whether each entry's **machine-written summary** (the "What happened" / "In plain English"
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prose) states only what the article supports. Quote fidelity is not summary fidelity. The worked counter-example
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is `magazine-040`, where the summary says the piece closes "with Satoshi resting on the 97,250th block, a nod to
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the last block he mined" — the article's own closing lines are a Genesis 2:2 rewrite ("By Block 97250, Satoshi had
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finished the work over which he labored"), and no public analysis ties 97,250 to Satoshi's last mined block
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(Patoshi analyses put that near block 54,316, May 2010). The quote is faithful; the interpretive clause is not
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supported. Found by zephyrus-sparkborn in Q4 (`f50f052`), reproduced and extended here.
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- Point-in-time 2026-09-24. A live article can be edited after the archive captured it; this test says the excerpts
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match the articles **as they are today**.
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