Source Review
Before Stronger Claims, Review the Source Trail
This workflow helps the project turn research leads into public citations without overclaiming sensitive history, identity, ancestry, living Nation language, DNA, legal status, or community memory.
What this workflow adds
- It turns a vague claim into a reviewable packet with exact wording, source type, place context, and support limits.
- It makes weak bridges visible before they become public confidence language.
- It gives editors a repeatable place to hold, narrow, relabel, or escalate a claim instead of arguing from memory.
- It keeps privacy, living-community risk, and identity-adjacent language in the same review lane as the sources.
What a good source-review result looks like
- The exact public wording is written down, not paraphrased loosely.
- The page names what is record, what is interpretation, what is memory, and what is still open.
- The place and institution trail is visible enough for another reader to continue the research.
- The page ends with a clear decision: publish carefully, hold, rewrite, or escalate.
Hold, rewrite, or publish criteria
- Publish carefully when the source trail supports the exact wording, the privacy risk is low, and the page labels interpretation clearly.
- Rewrite when the evidence supports a narrower place, date, institution, or source-type claim than the current wording suggests.
- Hold when a claim depends on one ambiguous source, a living-person detail, unresolved name variation, or a contested identity-adjacent interpretation.
- Escalate when the claim involves DNA, legal status, descent, membership, tribal/Nation language, private family records, or public harm risk.
Minimum source-review packet
A review packet should include the claim, page URL, source type, place context, quote or paraphrase boundary, contradiction note, privacy risk, recommended wording, and owner/editor decision.
Reviewer decision note
The reviewer should leave one dated note that states whether the wording is publish carefully, rewrite, hold, escalate, fact-check, correct, or remove until a stronger source trail exists.
Owner Source Review Workflow
The deep research report is treated as source-trail guidance, not as public citation text. Re-find the real source, capture its public details, and cite that source directly before strengthening sensitive claims.
Ready-to-strengthen threshold: use at least one direct source for ordinary factual claims and two independent sources for sensitive or identity-adjacent claims. Living Nation, community, stewardship, media-rights, and privacy questions must be reviewed before publication.
What this workflow adds: It turns vague source confidence into a visible review packet with a decision, a risk category, and a public-wording boundary.
Needs owner review
A source trail exists, but the owner has not approved stronger public wording.
Needs expert/source review
The claim touches living Nations, sacred or funerary context, legal identity, DNA, descent, or contested history.
Ready for citation
The exact wording is supported by reviewable sources and can be cited publicly.
Keep cautious
The careful wording is safer than a stronger public claim.
Do not publish stronger
The stronger claim is unsupported, overbroad, or unsafe.
Required source fields
- Claim
- Proposed stronger wording
- Source title / creator
- Source URL / archive / location
- Source type
- Date created
- Date accessed
- What it supports
- What it does not support
- Privacy / living-person risk
- Reviewer initials / date
- Decision
Review risk categories
- Place names used as proof of ancestry, settlement, or legal identity.
- Mound centers assigned to modern identity labels without official source support.
- Artifacts, trade goods, or exchange routes used as proof of identity membership.
- Colonial firsts written in a way that erases prior Indigenous histories.
- Muur, Moor, Mexica, Aztec, and Moctezuma/Montezuma language collapsed into one concept.
- DNA, genealogy, descent, legal identity, or community-membership claims.
- Harmful historical source language quoted without context.
- Sacred, funerary, burial, repatriation, or restricted cultural material.
Public copy rule
Until review is complete, keep using careful language such as "source trail to review," "what is supported," "what is open," "needs review," and "interpretive caution." This project does not certify identity, ancestry, tribe, nationality, DNA conclusions, legal status, descent, or membership.
What remains open: Even a strong source-review packet may still end in a hold, narrower wording, or escalation when privacy, living-community, identity, or contested-history risks remain unresolved.