Refract

Watch Pluto stop being a planet

On 24 August 2006, the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet. Wikipedia's Pluto article went through 43 revisions in under an hour that afternoon. Here is what Refract reports for its first sentence:

UTC	First sentence	Source
13:39	Pluto is the ninth and smallest of the traditional planets of the Solar system, though its status as a planet has been disputed…	revision
13:40	Pluto is the ninth and smallest of the traditional planets of the Solar system, but on August 24, 2006 it was 'demoted'…	diff
13:41	Pluto was until recently considered the ninth…	diff
13:59	Pluto is considered the ninth and smallest of the traditional planets of the Solar system, except by the IAU…	diff
14:09	Pluto is widely considered the ninth…	diff
14:10	Pluto was considered the ninth…	diff
14:20	Pluto at one time was considered the ninth…	diff
14:37	Pluto was considered the ninth and smallest of the planets of the Solar system…	diff

Rows are excerpts and skip the edits between them. Captured events · Walkthrough. Article text by Wikipedia contributors, CC BY-SA.

Follow that sentence yourself (Node.js 20+ and network access). This prints it from each of the 43 revisions:

npx @refract-org/cli claim Pluto --text "ninth and smallest" --from 71593043 --to 71601937

Browse every change from that hour as a timeline. Fetching takes about a minute, then your browser opens:

npx @refract-org/cli explore Pluto --from 71593043 --to 71601937

Refract reports what changed. Why it changed, and whether that matters, is for you to judge.

Who it's for

• Researchers and journalists who need to show when a statement appeared, changed, or lost its citation.
• Developers feeding wiki content to RAG pipelines or agents who need change events alongside the current text.
• Anyone who relies on a set of wiki pages and wants to see what changed since they last checked.

Refract reads Wikipedia and any other MediaWiki wiki. It does not fetch arbitrary web pages; the libraries accept versioned text you supply. Events carry no editor identity, and the misuse policy rules out editor targeting.

Questions it answers

Your question	Command	What you receive	Start here
“What changed in my pages since my last review?”	refract review	Pending changes with full text, source links, coverage, and explicit acknowledgment	Review a watchlist
“When did this text appear, change, or disappear?”	refract claim	Candidate text, match kind, latest revision, and status within the fetched revisions	Inspect changes to a passage
“What did the page say at an earlier date?”	refract snapshot	A text preview and revision ID at or before the requested date	Inspect an earlier record
“My application needs changes as data.”	refract export	NDJSON events to filter, store, or pass to your review process	Build a review feed

Install

npm install -g @refract-org/cli
refract analyze "Bitcoin" --depth detailed --json

This reads the page's latest 20 revisions. Use a page title, not a URL. For another wiki, pass its api.php endpoint with --api.

Choose a history range and output mode · Install compatibility

Try it offline

init runs the analyzers on a bundled fictional library history and makes no wiki requests:

npx @refract-org/cli init

review keeps changes pending until you acknowledge an inspected report, then compares later runs against that point:

npx @refract-org/cli review --sample --from 1 --state-dir ./review-state

Complete review workflow · Captured review · Offline recipe

What Refract captures

Part of the record	Examples
Sentences	First observed, modified, removed, reintroduced
Citations	Added, removed, replaced
Document structure	Section changes, lead/body changes, page moves
Links, categories, templates	Added, removed, template parameters changed
Revision activity	Revert patterns and edit clusters
Talk pages and access controls	Nearby talk-page activity and protection changes

Events can carry deterministic enrichment fields such as change magnitude, extracted terms, and certainty-marker counts. Event reference

How it works

Refract compares revisions under deterministic rules and makes no model calls. The same captured inputs, analyzer versions, and configuration produce the same events; export timestamps can differ. Coverage is limited to the analyzed revisions and the matching rules.

A citation does not establish that a statement is supported, and changed wording does not establish that editors disputed it. Your application decides what the events mean.

Architecture · Claim-state timelines · Repository boundary · Share or check a result

Use it in your application

Interface	Use it when	Example
CLI	You want to inspect or export a page's history	refract export "Bitcoin" --from 369361755 --to 369393212 --format ndjson
Libraries	You already fetch revisions or own versioned text inputs	buildRevisionEvents(revisions, { depth: "detailed" })
MCP	An agent needs to request histories and receive structured observations	refract mcp
Python	You work in Python and want events as dataclasses, DataFrames, or LangChain documents	pip install "git+https://github.com/refract-org/refract.git#subdirectory=clients/python"
Agent skill	Your coding agent should know which command answers which question	cp -R skills/refract ~/.claude/skills/
Viewer	You want to browse an exported file in a browser	Hosted viewer; source in apps/ui

Library adapter and data integrations · MCP setup · Agent skill · Private wiki access

Development and testing

git clone https://github.com/refract-org/refract.git
cd refract
bun install
bun run build
bun run test
bun run lint

The apps are workspaces with their own checks, run from their directories: bun run lint, bun run test and bun run build in apps/docs or apps/ui. The Python adapter uses Hatch and pytest in clients/python. CI runs them in docs-site.yml, viewer.yml and python.yml, separately from the engine gate.

Package	Role
@refract-org/evidence-graph	Types, schemas, identity and verification primitives
@refract-org/ingestion	MediaWiki access, pagination, retries, and authentication
@refract-org/analyzers	Deterministic revision comparisons and enrichment
@refract-org/cli	Commands and the local browser explorer
@refract-org/mcp	MCP library; the executable is refract mcp from the CLI
@refract-org/persistence	Local SQLite persistence; not published
@refract-org/eval	Evaluation harness and independently sourced labels

Runnable examples · Benchmark corpus · Repository map and related projects

License

AGPL-3.0. See LICENSE.

If you modify this software and deploy it as a network service, you must release your modifications.

Commercial use: NextConsensus offers commercial licenses for proprietary integration without AGPL obligations. See nextconsensus.com.

Community

• Contributing — how to get started
• Roadmap — what is being worked on
• Discussions — questions, ideas
• Code of Conduct
• Security
• Changelog
• Cite this software