Empowering communities to build verified, living chronicles of their own history.
Different tools for different purposes
Both platforms believe in community-driven knowledge. Both are valuable. But they serve different purposes.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It summarizes topics in narrative form, constantly evolving as consensus shifts.
Factkeeper is a historical ledger. It documents discrete occurrences, anchored to sources, verified by trained curators, and locked into a permanent record.
Wikipedia has one article on the "2020 United States Presidential Election" — a long narrative covering the entire topic, with information woven into prose.
Factkeeper deconstructs that narrative into hundreds of discrete entries: the certification of results in each state, specific legal challenges, key testimony, court rulings, procedural votes. Each entry is its own verified record with linked sources and people.
Why it matters: If you need to trace what happened on a specific day, in a specific place, Wikipedia requires you to dig through paragraphs. Factkeeper gives you a queryable, structured timeline.
Wikipedia articles can be edited indefinitely. The "current version" is always the consensus of whoever edited it most recently. This is great for evolving understanding, but it means the record shifts.
Factkeeper entries are verified against sources by trained curators, then locked. Once locked, an entry becomes part of the permanent record.
But locked doesn't mean uncorrectable. If an error is discovered, an entry can be reopened, edited, and relocked — with the full history of changes tracked. Every edit, every editor, every timestamp is preserved. Additionally, every entry has a public challenge page where anyone can flag errors, submit corrections, or provide additional evidence for the chronicle team to review.
Why it matters: The record is stable but not brittle. Corrections happen transparently, with accountability, rather than silently disappearing into revision history.
Wikipedia articles aim to tell the complete, current story. When new developments occur, the article is updated — burying the "how we got here" in deep revision history.
Factkeeper entries are snapshots in time. If NOAA employees are fired, that's one entry. If a court reinstates them, that's another entry. If an appeal reverses the reinstatement, that's a third. Each entry remains true to what was verified at the time.
Why it matters: History isn't a single narrative — it's a sequence of moments. Factkeeper preserves the sequence, ensuring that the intermediate steps are never erased by the final outcome.
Wikipedia enforces global notability standards. If your city council's controversial vote isn't "notable enough" for a global audience, it won't have an article.
Factkeeper empowers Community Sovereignty. Each Chronicle defines its own inclusion criteria. A local government accountability Chronicle can document every relevant vote, appointment, and decision — the exact kind of hyper-local history that Wikipedia explicitly rejects.
Why it matters: The history that matters to your community belongs in your Chronicle, with inclusion criteria you define.
Wikipedia uses sources to support sentences in an article. The source is a footnote.
Factkeeper treats sources as connective tissue. Each source is hard-linked to the entry it supports, the people referenced within it, and the organizations mentioned. You can navigate history by following the sources themselves, seeing how a single document connects multiple people and entries across time.
Why it matters: This creates a transparent "Chain of Evidence." Every fact has a traceable origin, and you can follow that chain wherever it leads.
Wikipedia depends on the Wikimedia Foundation maintaining live servers. The content exists as a dynamic website whose survival depends on that foundation's continued operation.
Factkeeper is built for Intergenerational Survival. Chronicle teams can export their entire chronicle as structured JSON — a complete, portable copy of their historical record. We provide a standalone Chronicle Reader that can open these exports, so the data remains usable even without the Factkeeper website.
Beyond local exports, chronicle data is archived to geographically distributed cold storage in open formats. And our long-term roadmap includes open-sourcing the core platform, so communities could run their own Factkeeper instance and import chronicles directly.
Why it matters: Your chronicle is yours. We're building infrastructure, not a walled garden. If factkeeper.org disappears tomorrow, the historical record — and the tools to read it — survive.
Wikipedia tells you about a topic. Factkeeper documents what happened — entry by entry, source by source, locked when verified, preserved in a vault for the next century.