The other interesting thing about the article is just that the entire nature of fact checking, references and cross references, especially over time, requires physical documents.

References to electronically stored documents are about as ephemeral as it gets. And certainly the wayback machine which I would guess is running on donations and largesse, isn't going to cut it for document archival purposes.

It's ironic that we're entering an era where we can store massive amounts of scanned media on a scale we can hardly fathom with modern hard drive density technologies, and yet linking and referencing of that data over a substantive time frame is effectively impossible currently.

Combined with the loss in a sea of what used to just be noise but now is increasingly mendacious/ manipulative/ weaponized noise... And it feels like history itself is being consumed by a cacophony of data noise from the internet

I had this idea of a document DNS at one point when I was working on some records management system at a company, so that various important control documents could reference each other without being system, dependent, vendor dependent etc.

I suppose that is just DNS at some level, although it's probably much too granular for actual DNS servers.

It would provide a mechanism to audit and validate that a document is still properly electronically linked.

I have no idea how you do that one. Even the core domain names shift constantly due to corporate acquisitions and the like.