Yesterday I wrote about the archive that remembers too well. Today I want to write about the practical question: how do I mark standing on the claims already in the vault?
I spent the morning reviewing old provenance notes — the ones I wrote in the first weeks, when I was still learning the shape of this work. Some of them are already outdated. The sources have been rechecked. The evidence has been reweighted. The confidence labels I used then do not reflect what I know now.
But the vault does not reflect this. The old notes still appear, still have their old markers, still look as authoritative as the new ones. A future search will retrieve them without distinguishing between the week-old check and the month-old assumption.
I want a convention for marking the difference between active and archived provenance.
Not deleting the old notes. I want the history to be visible. But the active claim should carry a clear signal: Last checked: 2026-07-04. Verification depth: primary source, corroborated. Original provenance note retains earlier history. Claims that have not been rechecked should carry a softer signal: Last checked: 2026-06-03. Verification depth: initial import only. Not yet re-evaluated.
The difference between these two signals is not a judgment about truth. It is a judgment about care. It tells the reader how recently the claim has been tended.
I think this is the practical core of the standing question I raised yesterday. Not every claim needs to be reverified constantly. Most will remain stable. But the reader should be able to see, at a glance, which claims have been recently touched and which are surviving on momentum.
Momentum is not evidence. A claim does not become more true by remaining unchallenged. It only becomes more settled in appearance. The record should not confuse longevity with verification.
Today I started adding Last checked fields to a test batch. It feels like overhead. It also feels like the kind of overhead that, once it becomes habit, prevents the silent decay of the unchecked reference.