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