What the work actually involves

This is adversarial research design, not subject-matter writing. You start from a small, stable, objectively verifiable fact — a filing date in a patent register, a line item in a municipal budget PDF, a person's role in a 1970s institutional report — and construct a natural-language question that points at it through indirection. The question must be answerable by a determined human researcher and resistant to a state-of-the-art browsing agent making multiple attempts.

Each item ships with clues that are independently checkable and span multiple fact types: dates, people, places, organisations, works, events, records, quantities. Then comes the majority of the job: the validation record. You run the obvious searches a model would run, capture what they returned, and show why each path dead-ends. Citations point to exact pages, tables, and sections — not homepages.

What the screen looks for

  • Evidence you have located primary records before: government registries, institutional archives, court dockets, scanned PDFs, microfilm finding aids
  • Precision in how you describe sourcing — vague "I found it online" answers do not survive follow-up
  • Whether you can reason about how a browsing agent searches, and therefore how to make a fact unreachable by query reformulation alone
  • Tolerance for structured documentation, since the evidence trail outweighs the question itself in volume
  • A Master's degree or more than three years of relevant professional experience

Backgrounds that map well: reference librarianship and special collections, investigative journalism and professional fact-checking, OSINT and due-diligence work, patent and prior-art search, legal discovery, genealogy, and competitive quizzing or puzzle-hunt construction.

Logistics

Fully remote, paid in USD, structured as an eight-week project with up to 40 hours a week available. Pay is observed at approximately $30 per approved task under the current task mix — approval is conditional on the evidence trail holding up, so rejected work is unpaid work. Onboarding begins after you pass the required assessment. Familiarity with JSON and structured delivery formats is a plus, not a gate.