What are “orphans”?
When you make an annotation in Hypothesis, it anchors itself to the text in the page. When you come back to that page, we look for that same anchor text, and if we find it, add a highlight and link that to your annotation.
However, sometimes the content of web pages and PDFs can change, and we can no longer find the anchor text. When this happens, we don’t get rid of or hide your annotation. Instead it goes into a category called “Orphans”. The anchor text, crossed out, still appears on the annotation card.
You can continue to find your orphaned annotations on the web page or PDF, and on our Activity Page.
You can read more about orphans here.
What if the web page has moved to a new address?
See this page for help when web pages change their address.