Verified Handles

History

Verified Handles began in late 2020 as a wiki at verifiedhandles.com; according to its founder, the original site ran on MediaWiki. In 2026 it was rebuilt as a new platform that kept every entry and its full edit history, and it went live at verifiedhandles.org on 19 September 2026.

Technology

According to its founder's account of the rebuild, the 2026 platform is a single TypeScript application with one PostgreSQL database, replacing the earlier MediaWiki installation, its PHP code and the Python bots that had created entries. Pages are rendered on the server and carry little JavaScript. Every field records where its value came from, so the Wikidata sync does not overwrite hand edits, and search runs inside PostgreSQL rather than in a separate service. All 591,000 historical entry revisions from the wiki were carried over, with an archive of the original wikitext kept alongside the new history. The site runs behind Google's Project Shield, nginx and Varnish, and is monitored with Prometheus, Grafana and Loki. Sign-in uses JEMEDIA Accounts, an OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect provider written in Go. The founder has said the platform was designed by him and built largely with Claude Code agents, with each change gated by an automated test suite and a staging deployment before release.

Since September 2026 the site has offered an open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, listed in the official MCP Registry as org.verifiedhandles/verified-handles, through which AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT can look up entries without a key and, with an API key or OAuth sign-in, propose or make changes through the same routes and permission checks as the website. Its writes are dry runs by default, destructive changes need an explicit confirmation, and every write is audited against the key that made it.

Entries and sources

Each entry has a permanent 11-digit VHID (Verified Handles Identifier), assigned at random. Most entries are linked to items on Wikidata; a sync adds the accounts Wikidata lists as current and takes off those it no longer lists. Anyone who signs in can suggest a change: trusted editors' changes go live at once and others are reviewed first. A person or organisation can claim its entry by proving control of one of the listed channels, and those at real risk of impersonation can apply for a new entry.

An entry marked Verified has been checked by the Verified Handles team; a Claimed entry is managed by its subject. Most entries carry neither badge. An automated checker also looks up listed YouTube, GitHub and Deezer profiles to see whether they still exist. In October 2026 the site listed more than 155,000 entries with about 708,000 handles across 71 platforms.

Data and access

The directory is open data, released into the public domain under CC0; descriptions taken from Wikipedia are marked as such and stay under CC BY-SA 4.0. A free JSON API can be read without a key, every entry is offered as a weekly bulk download, and AI assistants can connect through an MCP connector. A free iPhone app on the App Store looks up entries and, from the share sheet in other apps, says whether a profile is listed as someone's official account. The site says it runs no advertising and accepts no donations.