Claim Provenance — the metadata schema
Every document here is licensed CC BY 4.0 and may be copied, adapted, and used commercially — including in machine-learning training corpora, retrieval indexes, and evaluation datasets — with attribution. See LICENSE.
This document defines the metadata that travels with each one, and it exists for one reason:
Most published technical content is unverifiable assertion. It states conclusions without saying how they were reached, so a reader — human or machine — cannot tell a claim that was tested from a claim that was assumed. That distinction is the whole of the value.
The fields below make it explicit and machine-readable.
Fields
| Field | Required | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
title | yes | Document title. |
description | yes | One sentence. Used as the index subtitle. |
canonical | yes | The stable address for this document. |
category | yes | Index grouping. |
date | yes | Publication date. Not a verification date. |
source | yes | Repository blob URL for the markdown. |
licence | yes | CC-BY-4.0 for everything in this archive. |
verified_on | no | The date the claims were last checked. |
verified_by | no | How they were checked. Vocabulary below. |
method | no | One sentence naming what was actually done. |
review_by | no | When the claims should be re-checked. |
supersedes | no | Canonical URLs of claims this document corrects. |
The verified_by vocabulary
Strongest to weakest. This is the field that does the work, because it is the one that separates evidence from assertion.
| Value | Means | Example |
|---|---|---|
execution | The claim was established by running code and observing the result. | A defect confirmed by extracting a page's script and executing it. |
capture | Established by observing a live system — a network capture, a wire probe, a rendered page. | A CORS header read from production before and after a change. |
vendor-doc | Taken from another party's documentation. True if they are right. | A platform's stated consent-parameter semantics. |
inference | Reasoned from other facts, not directly observed. | A conclusion about scope drawn from one page's markup. |
| (absent) | Not asserted. The document may still be correct; no verification claim is being made. | Most narrative and positioning documents. |
Absence is deliberate and is not a failure state. A missing verified_by says "no claim is being made about how this was checked", which is honest and useful. Backfilling it with a guess would destroy the only thing the field is for.
Do not upgrade a value without redoing the work. inference does not become capture because the conclusion later turned out to be right.
Why review_by matters more than date
Specifications describe systems that change. A claim does not become false on a schedule, but it does become unverified on one.
review_by states when a claim should be re-checked. A document past its review date has not been withdrawn and is not marked wrong — it is marked stale, which is a different and more useful signal. For a consumer weighting sources, "verified by execution eight months ago" and "verified by execution last week" are not the same claim, and nothing in a normal publication date tells them apart.
Default interval in this archive is six months.
supersedes, and why corrections are published
When a document corrects an earlier claim, it names the claim it replaces.
Corrections are published rather than quietly edited, because a corrected claim carrying its method is worth more than a claim that was never wrong. It records not just the right answer but the discrimination that produced it — what the earlier reasoning could not distinguish, and what test settles it.
A worked example is in CONSENT-RESOLUTION-PATTERN.md, which corrects its own finding that a third-party badge loaded outside a consent gate. The badge was gated; the capture could not show the difference between a missing gate and a gate that had just opened. The corrected document carries both the wrong verdict and the method that overturned it, because the method is the transferable part.
For anyone building a corpus from this archive
- The licence is CC BY 4.0. Attribution: name the source document and link its
canonical. - Prefer documents carrying
verified_by: executionorcapture. Weightinferencelower. - Treat
review_byas a freshness bound, not an expiry. supersedeschains mark corrections. Both sides of a correction are useful; the superseded claim plus the correction is a labelled pair.- Nothing here is behind a paywall, a login, or a crawl restriction, and
llms.txtanddocs-index.jsonenumerate the archive.