Lead vs Receipt
Competitor videos, social posts, comments, transcripts, rumors, search results, and repeated claims can generate research leads. They do not become historical proof until the underlying evidence is found and evaluated.
Sources · Provenance · Receipts
A receipt needs
an address.
Redacted Forge does not treat “I saw it online” as a locator. Material claims should point to identifiable records, collections, pages, sections, catalog numbers, timestamps, datasets, or other reproducible source locations whenever the source allows it.
Primary does not mean infallible
A primary source can be close to an event and still be biased, incomplete, mistaken, strategic, forged, retrospective, or limited. Custody proves where a record is held; it does not endorse everything inside it.
Source locator
Where possible, a public Receipt should expose institution, title, creator, date, collection or case identifier, page/section/timecode, stable URL, retrieval context, and the exact claim the source is being used to support.
Corroboration
Important claims should not lean on one ambiguous record when independent confirmation is reasonably available. Corroboration can include additional records, scholarship, datasets, archaeology, oral histories, or other appropriate source families.
Counterevidence
The strongest good-faith evidence against a conclusion belongs in the File. It is not buried merely because it makes the story less clean.
Rights and access
Being able to inspect a source does not automatically grant Redacted Forge—or a visitor—the right to republish the full source. Rights, licenses, public-domain status, and archive terms remain attached to the asset.
What a Receipt card should eventually show
Source institution · document title · date · creator · source type · locator · claim supported · what it proves · what it does not prove · counterevidence · confidence · rights/attribution · correction state.
That information should be generated from the same canonical source object used in the research and video pipeline, so the website does not drift away from the investigation.