# Investigations: one question, chased down

> Research: collected from outside sources and what this site derives from them; every fact links to a saved copy of its source.

The fact-check desk's investigations: a question chased down to every measurement, its provenance, every restatement and every correction.

# Investigations: one question, chased down to its measurements

The claims ledger grades sentences. An investigation takes one question and chases it down: every number on it, who measured it, how, over what, as of when, and the bytes it was read from; then every place the number was repeated, how its wording changed on the way, and whether anyone corrected it. Run by the [fact-check desk](../index.html).

### [How much PHP is there, and where does '70%' come from?](php-share/index.html) open

*How much of the web runs on PHP, by every measure that someone actually measures; and how did one of those measures become '70% of the Internet'?*

About 69% of the websites whose server-side language W3Techs can identify, and falling: it was 80.6% in 2015. On every site the HTTP Archive crawls, PHP is detected on about half (48%). WordPress alone, which needs PHP, is on 39.6% of all websites. On the internet, the scanners count PHP on about 2 to 3 million hosts. No one measures a share of 'the Internet'. '70% of the Internet' is a website figure, restated in Wiz's own post, then copied.

Opened 2026-10-24, as of 2026-10-24T01:50Z; 29 measures, 127 statements traced.

The data behind each investigation is in `admin/factcheck/investigations/` and in [data/factcheck.json](../../data/factcheck.json). Pages the desk fetched from outside the evidence vault are shown with their address, time and sha256, and are labelled as the desk's own fetches: they are not evidence of the story until a collector captures them.


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site v0.18.0 · data as of 2026-10-24T16:05Z · vault commit 8c16a64a7cf6 · https://php.oct.2026.newsroom.sgit.ai/factcheck/investigations/index.html