# Provenance Principle: provenance is a design constraint, not metadata. A page that cannot show where its statements came from is not finished. This module governs how machine-generated output gets archived on viki.wiki pages and how corrections are made. Grounding: these conventions are reconstructed from the faq.html / more-faq.html corpus work (archiving Gemini output about the practice) and from Federated Wiki's own mechanics. When the live FAQ files are supplied, tighten this module against them — the pattern level below is stable; the exact label strings should be confirmed. ## Archiving machine output - Label every machine-generated passage with its source: model name, and the date of generation. The label is visible in the reading surface, not hidden in a comment. Archived machine output is a quotation from a system, and is typeset as what it is. - Do not silently repair machine errors. The record of what the machine said wrong is part of the corpus. Corrections are applied as named, dated corrections adjacent to (or journaled beneath) the original — precedent cases from the FAQ work: the Friston gloss, the PENELOPEMACHINE attribution, the Kim Fine / Spiritual America reframing. - A correction states what was wrong, what is right, and on whose authority. Flat sentences. No triumph. ## JSON-LD Archived corpora carry schema.org typing alongside the visible text. Skeleton:
```json { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Quotation", "text": "…the archived machine passage…", "creator": { "@type": "SoftwareApplication", "name": "model-name" }, "dateCreated": "YYYY-MM-DD", "isBasedOn": { "@type": "WebPage", "url": "…prompting context if applicable…" }, "editor": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Victoria Campbell" }, "dateModified": "YYYY-MM-DD", "correction": "…named correction text, if any…" } ```
Adjust `@type` to fit the artifact (Quotation, Answer within an FAQPage, Dataset). The invariants: machine authorship typed as SoftwareApplication, human editorship typed separately, creation and modification dates both present, `correction` used rather than overwriting `text`. ## Fedwiki-native provenance - The journal is the ledger. Edits accrete; reinterpreting a subset of journal actions recreates any version of a page. Do not fake this with prose changelogs when the journal can carry it. - Fork trails preserve source authority. In FolkMemory's terms: objects carry a trail to more authoritative servers; trail climbing leads toward the primary authority. A page's provenance is checkable by walking its trail — design pages so the walk succeeds. - A site is a single author/editor expected to preserve the domain name as a reference for attribution. Attribution in the federation is the domain. ## The FAR tie Federation Augmented Retrieval treats distribution across independent stores as the counter to counterfeitable evidentiary authority: a claim's weight comes from the checkable trail of its copies, not from the confidence of any single store. Archived machine output enters this economy the moment it is published — which is why the labels, corrections, and JSON-LD above are not optional courtesy. They are what makes the corpus citable against itself.