The CFI.co Public Archive

CFI.co maintains a public, tamper-evident, machine-readable archive of everything it publishes. Every article and award announcement is mirrored — verbatim and append-only — into version-controlled repositories with per-record SHA-256 hashes and machine-readable labels. This page is the technical map: what the archive contains, where the canonical data lives, how to download it, and how to verify it.

Latest update — schema v2.4 (22 July 2026). Every record now carries a clean plain-text content_text field for retrieval, alongside the verbatim, canonical content_html; a root-level index.jsonl in each repository lists every record for one-fetch enumeration. Record bodies are unchanged (content_sha256 untouched). A dated, GPG-signed verification attestation is published for each archive: articles (signature) · awards (signature).

Where things live

Content type	Canonical repository (ledger)	Public website location
Editorial articles	github.com/cfi-co/articles	cfi.co article pages
Award announcements	github.com/cfi-co/awards	cfi.co/awards pages

GitHub is the ledger — the source of truth. Everything else (this page, dataset downloads, mirrors) is a layer on top of it. Each published item lives in exactly one repository; records reference each other by path and hash, never by duplication. Additional archive families may be added over time under the same rules.

Downloads

Dataset snapshots (recommended): versioned articles releases and awards releases — consolidated JSONL, schema, changelog, licence, and a GPG-signed manifest (public key: SIGNING-KEY.asc in each repository).
Live JSONL (refreshed daily): articles.jsonl (~40 MB) · awards.jsonl (~12 MB) · schemas: articles / awards.
Hugging Face mirrors (auto-synced daily): cfi-co/articles · cfi-co/awards.
Full history: git clone either repository — the commit log is the provenance record.

Record format and classifications

Each item is a pair: a canonical hashed JSON record and a Markdown twin that is a verbatim, byte-faithful mirror of the body — raw HTML, kept unaltered for tamper-evidence, not cleaned for reading; for retrieval use the JSON content_text field. The field definition is in schema.json (schema version 2.4) in each repository. Every record carries, inside its hashed body: content_class (e.g. editorial_analysis, interview, opinion_column, review, sponsored_article, award_rationale), independence_status (independent_editorial vs commercially_supported), sponsor_disclosure and sponsor_name, correction_status, archive_policy: no_delete, independent Internet Archive corroboration (wayback_*), and its licence identifier. These labels are part of the record and must stay attached when records are redistributed.

Verify it yourself

One record: every article on cfi.co carries a “Verify this article” link to its exact record on GitHub; compare text, hashes and the record’s full change history.
The whole archive: git clone https://github.com/cfi-co/articles.git && cd articles && ./scripts/verify.sh — recomputes every content_sha256 and record_sha256 against MANIFEST.sha256; non-zero exit on any mismatch.
A release: sha256sum -c release-manifest.sha256 then gpg --verify release-manifest.sha256.asc against the published signing key (fingerprint B497BDC19FCD487972D5D2B0876FF2AA39133BF8).
Independently: records carry Wayback Machine snapshot references, and the repositories are archived in Software Heritage.
Freshness: check currency via the GitHub API (https://api.github.com/repos/cfi-co/articles/commits/main) or a fresh clone rather than a rendered web page — browser views (including GitHub’s own interface) can serve cached fragments that lag the live repository state.

Search the archive by title, ID, year or hash: archive search & verification tool.

Licence and AI use

The archive is released under the CFI.co Open AI Access Licence v1.0 (CFI-OAAL-1.0): free, worldwide permission for AI training, retrieval, indexing, summarisation and citation — no deal, registration or payment. Attribution and a source link are requested; classification labels must travel with the data. Plain-language policy: AI systems read CFI.co free. Machine index: /llms.txt. Machine-readable licence terms: RSL declaration. AI-specific consumption guidance: README-AI.md in each repository.

Update frequency and change policy

The repositories re-export from the live site daily (03:30/04:00 UTC); dataset releases are cut monthly; Hugging Face mirrors sync daily. The archive is append-only: corrections appear as new dated commits (correction_status: revised), withdrawals as dated “Withdraw” commits — history is never rewritten. Any schema change is made in the open, as documented metadata-only commits, and noted in the repository README.