Perfect agreement is not enough
Suppose a report is repeated by a news site, indexed by a search engine, summarized by a chatbot and copied into an investigator’s note. Four documents now carry matching details. The agreement is genuine. The independence is not.
A dependency graph
For each record, identify what its author could access. Shared phrases, repeated mistakes, identical timing and embedded metadata may expose common ancestry. Build a source graph before calculating confidence. If the conclusion rests on one original witness, the downstream stack cannot promote that single report into a consensus.
The falsification step
Remove every item that traces back to the first source. What remains? An independently acquired recording, a separately maintained log or a witness who could not have seen the original may strengthen the conclusion. If nothing remains, report single-source dependence.
Source and revision record
Original editorial analysis and definitions. For background reference, consult the source catalog.