Methodology

How we detect a revision

The Revision Tracker is fully automated. No person chooses which articles to watch, decides which changes are worth showing, or edits the result. The same deterministic process runs on every tracked article, so the same inputs always produce the same output.

1. Discover. We read the public RSS feeds of the outlets we track to learn which articles have been published.
2. Archive. We ask the Internet Archive to capture each tracked article over time (via its Save Page Now service). The snapshots are stored by the Archive — a neutral, independent third party — not by us. That means anyone can re-check our work against the same public record.
3. Confirm. A change is only considered once an article has at least two distinct-content captures in the Archive. We compare the two most recent captures. This filters out transient rendering issues, A/B tests, and loading artifacts.
4. Noise filter. A fixed rule ignores whitespace, boilerplate, and any change below a set character threshold, so trivial churn is never published.
5. Classify & publish automatically. A mechanical rule (below) tags the change Substantive or Minor, and it is published immediately with links to both public Archive captures. There is no human review step — the trade-off is that we favor transparency and neutrality over editorial curation, and we show our evidence so you can judge every call yourself.

Substantive vs. Minor

Every revision we publish is tagged with one of two labels:

Substantive A change to facts, figures, quotes, attributions, named parties, numbers, dates, or the framing of what happened.

Minor A change to wording, grammar, formatting, headline length, or paragraph order that does not alter the reported facts.

The label is applied by a fixed rule, not a judgment call: a change is “Substantive” if it removes a paragraph or alters at least a set number of characters; otherwise it is “Minor.” These labels describe the size and nature of the textual change only. We do not assess or state a publication’s reason for making a change.

What we do and do not do

We report facts: what the text said before, what it says now, and when each version was captured. We do not draw conclusions about intent, and we do not speculate about why a change was made. Readers can review the side-by-side text and draw their own conclusions.