Sourced

Corroboration as a primitive. Given a stream of claims from many origins, Sourced tells you how many independent sources corroborate each one, since when, and hands you the receipts. It says "confirmed by sources" — never "the truth."

Every feed, every aggregator, every "is this real?" moment re-solves the same problem badly or not at all: a thousand items, each equally loud, no signal for which ones the world actually agrees happened. The missing layer is the oldest heuristic in journalism — get a second source — computed continuously over a live stream, honestly. Sourced is that layer, as one small function.

import { assess, createMemoryStore } from "@sourcedhq/core";

const store = createMemoryStore(); // or your KV / SQLite / file

const verdicts = await assess(
  [
    { id: "a", title: "Central bank raises rates", origin: "reuters", publishedAt: "2026-01-01T12:00:00Z" },
    { id: "b", title: "Central bank raises rates", origin: "bbc",     publishedAt: "2026-01-01T12:04:00Z" },
  ],
  { store },
);

// verdicts[1] → {
//   corroboration: 2,                 // distinct INDEPENDENT origins
//   corroboratingSources: ["reuters"],// the receipts
//   firstSeenAt: "2026-01-01T12:…",   // when the system first saw the event
//   signal: "breaking",               // confirmed | breaking | developing | null
// }

No dependencies. Storage, clustering, clock and thresholds are injected — run it against news, outage reports, OSINT feeds, sensor events or moderation flags. Sourced only counts; how you group "same event" is pluggable.

The honesty guarantees

These are invariants, not preferences — and they ship as an executable, adversarial test suite (@sourcedhq/conformance), not as promises:

#	Guarantee
G1	Undercount, never overcount. Matching is deliberately conservative (dual gate). A false "confirmed" is a reputation balloon that pops — Sourced always errs toward saying less.
G2	Never "true," only "corroborated." Truth is not computable from headlines; breadth of independent reporting is.
G3	Independence is by origin, not by article. Ten syndicated copies of one wire story count as one.
G4	Every verdict carries its receipts — who corroborated, since when. Falsifiable by design.
G5	Single sources stay bare. No badge, no signal. Silence protects credibility.
G6	Signal rides the reliable clock. Urgency comes from upstream publish time — a matching error can never invent "breaking".
G7	Fail open, never break. Dead storage, garbage input → claims pass through unlabeled. Degrading is safe; crashing is not.

Run the yardstick against any engine claiming to count sources:

import { runConformance } from "@sourcedhq/conformance";
const report = await runConformance(myAssessImplementation);

The transparency log

@sourcedhq/log chains every verdict batch into a tamper-evident hash chain (Certificate-Transparency style). Anchor the chain head anywhere public and the whole history becomes verifiable: rewriting any past verdict breaks every hash after it. "We have issued honest verdicts since day one" stops being a marketing line and becomes something you can check.

Packages

Package	What
@sourcedhq/core	The primitive: assess(claims, { clusters, store, archive, now, config }) → verdicts. Zero deps.
@sourcedhq/conformance	G1–G7 as adversarial executable cases + runner. The yardstick.
@sourcedhq/log	Hash-chained, anchorable transparency log for verdict history.

npm install        # workspace setup
npm test           # 20 adversarial + unit tests

Beyond news

The unit is (claim, origin, timestamp) — not "a news article". Swap the clustering and the storage, keep the counting and the guarantees:

npm run build && node examples/outage/run.mjs
# one flaky probe stays bare · repeat reports collapse ·
# 4 independent monitors → CONFIRMED, with receipts

npm run build && node examples/moderation/run.mjs
# one user flag → queue · AI confirms → DEVELOPING ·
# 2 human moderators agree → 4 flags = CONFIRMED, auto-action

News, outage detection, OSINT, sensor fusion, moderation queues — anywhere independent reports describe discrete events.

The Sourced surfaces

Domain	Function
sourced.ink	The spec, in ink — guarantees, docs, the pitch. The public face.
sourced.run	Run it — hosted assess playground & API.
sourced.network	The network — live transparency-log head, anchor history, verdict stats.

Who runs on it

Tickwire — the live news channel for the screen you already leave on — is built on Sourced: every ✓ N sources badge in the app is a Sourced verdict, receipts included.

Status & license

Early, honest, moving. The spec is stable (the guarantees are the contract); the API is frozen at v1. See docs/API-GUIDE.md for integration.

License: MIT for all code (see LICENSE). The Sourced name and mark are reserved — forks welcome, under their own name (see TRADEMARK-POLICY.md). "Sourced-conformant" is a claim you earn by passing @sourcedhq/conformance.

Contact: hello@tickwire.news.