Four Percent, Citation Needed
Nadia has to prove to a machine that she is a person, so that she can file a form asserting that she is the source. She is very good at this. She has been good at it for twelve years.
Behind the curtain+
Two stories on the same front page turned out to be one story a thousand years apart: a wiki collective describing how Google buries independent wikis launched on new domains, and a blog post tracing how the Buddha's life became the lives of two canonized Christian saints through six languages without anyone noticing. The reCAPTCHA Ask HN thread supplied the afternoon's actual mechanics and the phrase "this is a tarpit"; a post about factoring a certificate authority's 512-bit root, revoked in 2002 and still trusted by one virtual machine, supplied the story's logic without appearing in it.
Fiction in close third, because the observation underneath this material only gets interesting when it has a person standing in it who is not the victim of a bad record but an author of one. Everything is compressed into a single afternoon and a single article so that the traffic collapse, the verification loop, and the scraped copy are one predicament rather than three topics, and the transmission chain enters only through a Cultural References section the character wrote herself and can recite from memory.
The form was open in one tab and the check was open in another, and Nadia was on her fourth grid of buses.
The check would relent eventually. It always did, somewhere between three and five minutes, once it had made her identify enough street furniture to be satisfied she was slow. The trick was not to hurry. Hurrying looked automated. So she clicked a bus, waited for the tile to fade out and fade in another bus, clicked that one too, and used the gaps to get her evidence in order, because the scraped-content form timed out after ninety seconds and she was not going to lose the window twice in one afternoon.
Firefox, hardened, no third-party cookies. She knew what that cost her. She had known since roughly a week after she set it up, and she was not going to run a different browser to satisfy an intake process.
The evidence was easy, which was the irritating part. In one column, ashmarkwiki.org: four thousand one hundred and eight articles, twelve years of history, every revision timestamped and attributed, her own account on roughly two thirds of them. In the other column, the Vaultworks copy: the same four thousand articles as of March 2025, three ad slots per screen, an interstitial, and across the top of every page a generated summary in a box the same grey as the site chrome.
She and four others had left Vaultworks in March 2025 because Vaultworks had started running video ads over the infobox. They took the content, which was theirs, and stood up a clean domain, and Vaultworks kept the corpse and kept the rankings, and eighteen months later Google had indexed every page on ashmarkwiki.org and would serve exactly one of them, the homepage, to anybody who asked. Everything else was in there and would not come out. Eighty-five percent of a wiki’s traffic arrives through search. Hers had gone from a hundred and forty-one thousand sessions a month to about three thousand nine hundred, and the three thousand nine hundred were people who already knew the URL.
Bus. Bus. Fire hydrant, which was not what it had asked for. Please try again.
The article she needed for the form was Bell of Iodaph, because Bell of Iodaph was the cleanest case she had. She pulled up her version and the Vaultworks version side by side, and read the generated summary at the top of theirs, which she had read eleven times and still read.
The Bell of Iodaph drops from the Drowned Chapel encounter at a rate of 4%, as confirmed by the developers in the Patch 3.7 notes.
There was no such line in the Patch 3.7 notes. There was no such line in any patch notes. Nadia had read all of them, twice, and had transcribed most of them onto the wiki herself, and the citation had not been copied from anywhere, because there was nowhere to copy it from. It had been supplied. Something had needed the number to be sourced and had produced a source, in the same confident register as the rest of the sentence, and the rest of the sentence was hers.
The four percent was hers too.
October 2016. She had the datamined loot tables for the whole Drowned Chapel except the Bell, which sat in a different table because it was flagged as a quest reward, and she had a stub to finish and a plan to grind the encounter over the weekend and get a real denominator. So she wrote 4%, tagged it, and left an edit summary. She could still see the summary in the history, because that is what histories are for: placeholder, verify.
She had not verified it that weekend. In February 2017 a user called Grendlwyrm had removed the tag with the edit summary cleanup.
Then in 2022 somebody pulled the real tables out of a leaked build, and the Bell came out at 2.2%, and Nadia updated her article the same evening with a proper reference and a note on the discrepancy. Which is when the article became wrong.
Bus. Two buses. Verified.
The form loaded. She had ninety seconds and she had everything, and she stopped, because before the form she had opened the talk page, and the talk page had a new thread on it from that morning, and the thread was from Grendlwyrm.
Nine years. Still going. His position was that every source a person could actually check said four percent. The compendium said four percent, page 212. The video said four percent at 12:40, and the video had nine hundred thousand views. The Vaultworks page said four percent and Vaultworks was what came up when you searched. Her article was the only place in the world that said 2.2%, it cited a datamine of a build that was never shipped, and would she please stop.
It was the seventh time. She had answered the first six.
The servers had gone dark in November 2019. She had filed the sunset template herself, and the encounter had been run for the last time by somebody, and nobody had written down how many times.
She knew the shape of this because she had written the shape of this. Cultural References, on that same article, her text, 2018, and she could still say it without looking. Iodaph off a Wikipedia page, because Petar needed a saint who did not sound Catholic and said so in a Discord in 2017. Josaphat in the Latin. Ioasaph in the Greek. Balavariani in the Georgian. Budhasaf in the Arabic. Bodisav in the Persian. Bodhisattva, at the front, in Sanskrit. It went as far as Iceland. Missionaries carried a version of it into Japan in 1591 and handed it back to the people it came from, and nobody involved knew that either, and it took until the nineteenth century for anyone to say so out loud, and then in 1969 the Church took the feast day off the calendar and left the relics exactly where they were.
She counted. Seven hands before Petar. Then Petar, then her, then Vaultworks, then the box at the top in chrome grey.
Nadia let the form time out.
Then she opened her own article, put the cursor after the 2.2, and typed four percent back in. She moved the datamine reference down into a note that said one source gives a lower figure. Above it she put three references, formatted properly, the way she formatted everything: the compendium with the page number, the video with the timestamp, and Vaultworks, which she cited as a mirror of an earlier revision of this article, because it was, and because that was the honest way to describe it.
Preview. Save. Edit summary: per sources.
Nine years the number had wanted a citation and now it had three, and the tag would never go back on, because the tag was for facts nobody had sourced yet.
She marked the thread resolved. Then she closed the check, which had been sitting there patiently the whole time with a green tick in it, waiting to let her through to a form she no longer had anything to put in.
Sixty stubs in the queue, and about an hour before dinner. She started on Censer of the Ninth Hour, which nobody had touched since 2019 and which somebody, eventually, would need.