Analysis depth levels
The --depth flag controls how many analyzers run and how aggressively they parse. Applies to analyze, diff, and explore commands.
| Level | Analyzers | Use case |
|---|---|---|
brief |
Section differ only | Quick check — did anything change on this page? |
detailed |
Section differ, citation tracker, revert detector, template tracker | Standard analysis — most common |
forensic |
All analyzers including protection tracker, page move detector, category diff, wikilink diff, talk page correlation, edit cluster detection, sentence modification detection | Full audit — all 26 event types |
brief skips citation parsing, revert pattern matching, and template extraction. It only compares section headings between revisions.
detailed (default) runs the full set of deterministic analyzers. Sufficient for most workflows.
forensic enables cross-revision correlation (talk page matching, edit cluster detection), metadata trackers (protection changes, page moves, category and wikilink diffs), and sentence modification detection. Use when you need the complete event stream — all 26 event types — for export or visualization.
Example:
refract analyze "Earth" --depth forensic --cache