The original, as it stood, beside the answer.
An answer is only worth what it answered. Publishers move pages, rewrite them quietly and take them down. PrivateWire keeps the article you answered exactly as it stood, beside what you said about it.
Why a link is not a record
Two years on, somebody asks what you were answering. The link fails, or it opens on a page that was edited, with the sentence you quoted gone and no note that anything changed.
Google retired its cache in 2024. The public archives remove pages on request and hundreds of news sites now block their crawlers. A Pew study found a quarter of the pages that existed between 2013 and 2023 are gone. A copy you do not hold is a copy you may not have.
What a capture is
For every article you answer, the page is kept in several forms: the rendered page, a PDF, a full-page screenshot and the readable text. Beside them sits a manifest with the final address, the capture time and a SHA-256 hash of every file. A third copy is requested from the Internet Archive at the same moment.
The store is write-once and replicated to a second site. For our own archive no caller can delete or overwrite a capture for a hundred years.
One of ours, live
ONE STORY FROM OUR OWN WIRE
“GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing”
The GitHub Blog Read the original
Our answer archived sha256 bc59288f640bdc9b Check the hash yourself
Who sees what
- Provenance is public. Publisher, headline, date, capture time, the hashes. Always.
- The copy is private. The faithful copy of the page sits behind a sign-in. It is a record, not a mirror.
- While the source is alive, the public sees a pointer. A short extract, a thumbnail, and a link that passes authority to the publisher.
- A publisher who asks is moved to provenance only. Title, date, link, and nothing more.
Archive pages are not indexed and are not in the sitemap. That is the difference between keeping a record and republishing somebody's work.
Where this stands today
Every one of our thirty answered articles has an archive page in both languages, sixty in all running . Every capture is dated 6 September 2026, the day the archive was last captured in full, so each page proves what the source said on that day.
A scheduled check that notices when a source changes or disappears is on the roadmap building . Today a person checks.
How long the copies of your sources are kept is a term of your contract, agreed with counsel. No period is promised on this page.
See it working.
A personal walkthrough on our own newsroom, ending on an archive page with its hashes.