Provenance

Six fields, and a post is not a post without them.

Which request. Which agency. Under which jurisdiction’s law. Filed on. Answered on. With what outcome. Everything else on a post is the author’s reading; this part is the record.

Footage: Artyom Saqib / Pexels

Provenance is the credibility. Not the byline, not the platform, not the design of the page — the fact that a stranger who doubts the work can go and get the same records from the same agency and see for themselves.

A document on its own carries almost no weight. It has no chain of custody, no context, and nothing that distinguishes a genuine release from a fabrication, a partial page from a whole one, or a 2019 policy from the one in force. The reader is left doing the only thing available: deciding whether they trust the person who posted it.

That is a terrible place to put a reader, and it is worse in this subject than most, because the whole point of records research is to hold institutions to something other than their own word. A publishing surface that asks the reader to substitute trust in an author for trust in an agency has not moved anything; it has changed who you are asked to believe.

A request identifier, an agency and two dates turn “trust me” into “check it”.

What a post carries

This block appears on every post, above the author’s own writing. It is assembled from the ingest call, not typed into the composer.

Request: REQ-2026-0184 — the identifier the request was filed and tracked under
Agency: The body that answered. Not “a police department” — the one that received the request.
Jurisdiction: Whose public-records law it was filed under. Deadlines, exemptions and appeal rights are all different across these, and “FOIA” is not a synonym for a state act.
Filed: 3 February 2026 — the date the request went to the agency
Answered: 17 March 2026 — the date the response came back
Outcome: Partial release Released Denied No records

Why each one is there

The request identifier: It is the handle a reader uses to ask the agency about this specific request, and the handle an agency uses to find it in their own system. Without it, a dispute about what was asked for is unresolvable.
The agency: Two agencies can hold records on the same events and answer completely differently. Which one answered is a fact about the research, not a formality.
The jurisdiction: The federal FOIA, fifty state acts and a great many local ordinances are genuinely different laws. What counts as exempt, what a deadline is, and whether there is a deadline at all vary — five states have no statutory response deadline at all. A reader who does not know which law was used cannot assess whether a delay or a refusal was lawful.
The two dates: Filed and answered. The gap between them is itself evidence, and it is the piece most often left out. A ninety-day gap on a routine request says something about the agency; a same-week answer says something else.
The outcome: Released, partial, denied, or no records. A “no records” response is a finding, not a dead end — an agency asserting that something does not exist is a fact worth publishing, and it is appealable. Posts recording a denial or a no-records answer are as legitimate here as posts carrying documents.

When a field is missing

The post says so, in the place the field would have been, in the same type as the rest of the block. A missing jurisdiction reads “Jurisdiction: not recorded”. It does not collapse to a tidier layout, and the field is not quietly dropped.

A gap in the provenance is information the reader needs. Hiding it to keep the page neat converts an incomplete record into one that looks complete, which is the single most misleading thing a design decision can do here.

Records obtained another way

Not everything worth publishing came from a request. Leaks, court exhibits, discovery, and documents an agency put on its own website are all real sources. They can be published, and the provenance block says what it actually knows — “Source: not a records request” — rather than borrowing the authority of a request that was never filed. A post that cannot show a request is not less welcome; it is differently labelled.

What provenance does not prove

This is the part that gets left out of pages like this one, so it goes here rather than in a footnote.

It does not prove the document is genuine. This platform does not verify that a file attached to a post is the file an agency sent. It has no channel to the agency, no signature to check, and no way to distinguish a real release from a convincing forgery.
It does not prove the release is complete. An agency that withheld half of what it holds produces a genuine, correctly-provenanced, badly incomplete release.
It does not prove the author read it correctly. The provenance covers where the records came from. Everything after that is argument, and argument is the author’s.
It does not prove the records are true. Agencies write things down that are wrong. An internal report is evidence of what the agency recorded, which is not the same as evidence of what happened.

What provenance does is narrower and more useful than any of those: it makes the work checkable. A reader who doubts a post has a specific, actionable next step, and so does anyone the post is about. The full list of limits →

The test

Could a stranger who thinks you are wrong
go and find out?

If the answer is yes, the post is doing its job whether or not the reader agrees with a word of the analysis. If the answer is no, the analysis is the only thing there — and nobody should have to take that on trust.

Footage: Sergei Skrynnik / Pexels

How this works

0:53 · narrated · captioned · served from this site, and nothing is sent anywhere when you press play. Prefer to read it? The transcript is below.

Transcript

At	Section	What it says
0:02	The claim	A document on its own carries almost no weight. It leaves a reader deciding whether they trust whoever posted it, which is a terrible place to put a reader.
0:11	Six fields	So every post carries six: the request identifier, the agency, the jurisdiction, the date filed, the date answered, and the outcome of the request.
0:22	Why each	The jurisdiction matters because fifty state acts and the federal one are genuinely different laws. The gap between the two dates is itself evidence.
0:31	Missing fields	A field that was never recorded says so, in the place it would have been. Hiding a gap to keep the page tidy makes an incomplete record look complete.
0:40	What it is not	It is not authentication. It does not prove the document is genuine, complete, or true. What it does is make the work checkable by a stranger who doubts it.