# Source provenance

Canonical HTML: /atlas/provenance
Atlas version: atlas-2026-07-28-v1
Category: Quality, provenance, and observability

## Definition

Provenance records where a claim came from, when it was observed, and which transformations produced the presented form.

## How it works

A provenance-aware system separates primary evidence, independent corroboration, dependent repetition, and the final citation used in an answer.

## How to validate it

Persist claim, source URL, source type, publication time, extraction time, cited source, and selection rule as separate fields.

## Common failure

Many pages repeating one unsupported claim are not many independent sources; counting them as consensus rewards propagation.

## Related topics

- [Content freshness](/atlas/content-freshness)
- [Duplicate content](/atlas/duplicate-content)