App 03 · Controlled evidence room
The Fourth Record
Three records make a documentary: what the courts wrote, what witnesses said, what the author argues. The fourth is the record of how the project came to hold any of it — custody, reviewer, version, status, and every correction, kept where a reader can see it.
Triple Lens on CR-0048 · how this works
Why a room like this exists
A film can be accurate and still be unaccountable. If nobody outside the edit suite can see where an item came from, who checked it, which version made the cut and whether the person in it still consents, then accuracy is a claim rather than a property. This register is the answer to that: every item that touches a page or a frame has a row, and every row has a provenance drawer.
Production truth for this room
The twelve items below are sample register entries written for this prototype. Court-record items name real published decisions and are labelled RECORD; the interview, scan and photograph items are illustrative and say so in their provenance notes. No custody chain, licence, release or reviewer sign-off described here exists. Several items are deliberately shown in blocking states, because a register that shows only cleared items is a marketing page.
Record-state legend & filter — the same four labels used in every room
Note what it means that editorial conclusions are registered as items here. An argument gets the same custody trail as a document: a version number, a reviewer, a date, and a record of the wording it replaced. That is the point of the room.
| ID | Item & where it is used | Type / record state | Custody | Reviewer | Ver. | Status | Detail |
|---|
Corrections log
Append-only, like the UPDATE door — and for the same reason.
A correction is a new entry. The superseded wording stays in the archive, the version number advances, and the numbering never changes underneath a reader who cited it. Even a consent withdrawal is logged: the passage is removed from the cut, and the fact of its removal is published.
Log
The four blocking statuses
Rights unresolved — attribution or ownership could not be established; the item cannot be published at all. Permission not granted — the holder has not granted use; nothing derived from it may ship. Redaction review — the item names living private individuals and cannot be published until review completes. Withdrawal clause active — a participant may remove material at any time, so the cut must remain re-editable. An item in any of these states cannot appear in a delivered asset, and the register enforces that by refusing to mark it verified.
Where this room connects
Every Record row in the QI Case Atlas has a matching court-record item here. Every entry in the VERIFY timeline should resolve to an item ID. Every correction in the UPDATE door has a twin in this log. The rooms are separate surfaces over one register, not four copies of the same list.
Custody rules, stated once
Five rules the register enforces.
One. Nothing enters a cut or a page without an item ID. If it has no ID, it has no custody, and it does not exist as far as the project is concerned.
Two. The person who obtained an item is never the person who verifies it. Producer and source reviewer are separate roles held by separate people, and the register records both.
Three. Record state is assigned at intake and can only be changed by a logged reclassification. A pleading does not quietly become an order because it was cited in a script.
Four. Consent is a live condition, not a signature in a drawer. Where a participant retains a withdrawal right, the item stays flagged for the life of the project and the edit stays re-openable.
Five. Corrections are additive. No entry is edited in place, no numbering is reused, and the superseded wording is kept so that a reader who quoted the old version can still find what they quoted.