Glossary

Claim — A distinct statement of fact within an article, identified by its text content. Claims are tracked across revisions via createClaimIdentity in @refract-org/evidence-graph. Not to be confused with "claim" in a legal or insurance context.

BYO-inference boundary — A point in the pipeline where a heuristic (e.g., regex revert detection, word-overlap threshold) can be replaced by a model call. Each boundary is a typed function signature with a mechanical default. When a model is plugged in, the event's FactProvenance.parameters records which path was taken. This is the architectural spine: Refract stays mechanical, but the points where judgment enters are explicit, typed, and auditable.

Deterministic fact — A structured statement produced by an analyzer explaining why an event was emitted. Each fact includes the analyzer name, version, input hashes for reproducibility, and optional effective parameters (when non-default config was used).

Deterministic observation engine — Refract's core design: given the same revision range, the same events are always produced. No model, no randomness, no variance.

Downstream consumer — A system that consumes Refract's event stream without modifying it to attach domain-specific interpretation. Examples include healthcare decision intelligence (NextConsensus), AI training data curation pipelines, provenance-aware RAG systems, regulatory/policy change monitors, competitive intelligence platforms, fact-checking tools, academic research on knowledge dynamics, journalism forensics tooling, and fan wiki canon tracking.

Edit cluster — A group of 3+ edits within a configurable time window, detected by detectEditClusters(). High cluster activity signals concentrated contestation — the same claim being edited repeatedly by one or more editors. Window size and minimum group size are configurable via AnalyzerConfig.

Event — A unit of change between two revisions. Every event has an eventType, revision range (fromRevisionId → toRevisionId), section context, before/after snapshots, and deterministic facts. See schema.

Evidence layer — A classification of how an event was produced: observed (directly from diff), policy_coded (matched against a rule), model_interpretation (set by downstream), speculative (inferred), or unknown.

Ground truth — Independently verified outcome labels (talk page consensus, RFC closures, ArbCom decisions) stored in the @refract-org/eval package. Used to validate pipeline output, never redefined by it.

L1 / L3 — Legacy terminology for the two layers: L1 (deterministic analysis) and L3 (ground truth validation). The preferred terms are "deterministic" and "ground truth."

MediaWiki — The open-source wiki engine used by Wikipedia, Fandom, and thousands of other wikis. Refract works with any MediaWiki instance that exposes an api.php endpoint.

ObservationReport — A structured aggregate produced by the pipeline that groups events by claim, with a ClaimLedger tracking each claim's lifecycle (first seen, removed, modified, reintroduced) across revision history. Output via --report flag.

sentence_modified — An event type emitted when sentence text changes but remains above the similarity threshold (word-overlap ratio, default 0.8). Captures rewording, minor edits, and phrasing changes without treating the sentence as removed-and-reintroduced.

Provenance — Metadata attached to each deterministic fact recording which analyzer produced it, what version, and which input data was used. Enables auditability.

Revision — A single version of a page. Revisions are identified by numeric IDs and ordered by timestamp.

Revision range — A contiguous span of revisions between a fromRevisionId and toRevisionId. Refract diffs adjacent revisions within the range to produce events.