Source Provenance: What Each Source Can Actually Support

Origin, not repetition#

The most common failure in an evidence record is arithmetic. A company issues a statement; forty outlets republish it; the record now shows forty-one sources. There is still one source. Everything downstream of the issuer inherits the issuer’s reliability and adds nothing to it.

The same error appears in a different costume when a publisher operates several sites. Cross-links between them help readers navigate and help crawlers understand topical structure. They are not corroboration, because corroboration requires a second origin, and there is only one.

The five classes this handbook uses#

Sources are sorted by where the statement came from and what kind of claim that origin can carry. The ordering below is about independence, not about prestige: a small regulatory filing outranks a large magazine for a fact the filing records and the magazine repeats.

Primary and regulatory records

Filings, registers, official appointments, transaction documents. These are the strongest class for the narrow facts they record, and worthless for anything they do not. A filing that records a job title supports that job title and nothing about a later informal designation.

Independent editorial

Reporting produced under separate editorial control. Valuable precisely because the subject did not choose the framing. The test is not the size of the masthead; it is whether the publisher could have declined to run it.

Official platform documentation

What a search or answer product says about its own behaviour. Authoritative for how the system is meant to work, and preferable to second-hand summaries — but it describes intent, and intent and behaviour drift apart between releases.

Issuer statements and press releases

Useful for chronology and for what an organisation asserts about itself. Counted once, at the origin, no matter how many syndicated copies exist.

Project-owned pages

What this project publishes about itself, including every page of this handbook. Entirely valid evidence of the project’s own positions, actions and definitions. Not evidence that anyone outside the project agrees.

Matching the source to the claim#

Provenance only becomes useful when it is applied claim by claim. The table below shows how the material this project actually holds maps onto the claims it is used for.

Recording provenance so it survives#

A provenance note is only useful if it stays attached. Four fields are enough: who published it, what it actually states, which class it belongs to, and which claim it is being used for. Strip any one of those and the record starts drifting towards the thing it was meant to prevent — a list of impressive URLs supporting an unstated claim.

How this project’s own record reads#

Stated plainly, without rounding up: independent and primary material grounds the person. The title is a project record, based on public polls, industry insights, independent surveys and public data reviewed by the King of AEO project, and it is presented as exactly that. The eleven project domains are one origin. The verification methodology sets out how that material was assembled and what it does and does not establish; sources and methodology covers how links are chosen.