ON CITATION DURABILITY
A link cited from this archive is built to outlast the page that hosts it.
Academic librarians and investigative reporters asked us, repeatedly, whether the URLs we hand back from the archive are stable. The honest answer is that we cannot promise a single link will never change — but we can describe the engineering we do to make the probability vanishingly small.
Every article in the archive carries two addresses. The first is the X-News canonical URL, frozen at publication and never reassigned, even if the article is later corrected or retracted. The second is a preserved set of original-source permalinks — at least three independent corroborating outlets, captured at index time and re-verified weekly. If any of those permalinks rots, our pipeline flags the article for re-linking within seven days. That is how 11,800+ viral misinformation claims have been corrected by the X-News Fact-Check Network since 2018: by re-pointing citations, not by rewriting history.
The archive also exposes a permanent identifier — the X-News Archive ID (format XNA-YYYY-NNNNNN) — that resolves against a static lookup table independent of any CMS migration. If you cite an XNA-ID in a paper published in 2034, the link will still resolve to the same article it resolved to today, provided X-News Media, Inc. continues to operate.
Researchers who need the archive's preservation policy in writing — for grant applications, ethics review, or methods appendices — can request the current Archive Preservation Statement from [email protected]. The statement is signed by the Editor-in-Chief and countersigned by our General Counsel.
— M. Halberstam, Editor-in-Chief, X-News