Verify

/scholar:verify

A study is a set of claims about a corpus that keeps moving. Without this, it rots into confident falsehood: every link still resolves, every number still reads as measured, and none of it is true any more.

Read ../../references/citation.md for what a citation was required to carry.

User arguments: $ARGUMENTS

Procedure

1. Walk every citation

For each cites entry in terms.jsonl, confirm three things separately, because they fail differently:

The ref still exists. A tag can be moved or deleted, and a deleted tag makes every URL built on it a 404 rather than a wrong answer.

The file still exists at that path on that ref.

$ curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' -L '<url>'

The quoted text still appears at the recorded locator. This is the one that fails silently: a file that grew by ten lines leaves a line-anchor citation resolving to unrelated code while still returning 200.

2. Re-run the measurements

With --refresh-metrics, run every command recorded in evidence/metrics.md and diff the output against what was recorded. A number that changed is not automatically wrong — the corpus moved — but it is no longer evidence for the claim it was cited under.

3. Report by failure mode

Four categories, because the remedy differs:

• Moved — the ref advanced or the tag was retargeted. Re-pin.
• Vanished — the file or ref is gone. The claim needs a new source or it needs retracting.
• Misquoted — the locator resolves but the text there is not what was quoted. This is the dangerous one, and it is why quotations are recorded rather than just links.
• Changed — a measurement produced a different number.

Rules

• Do not edit a claim in place. Anything that overturns a standing claim goes to /scholar:revise, which records what was believed and why it failed.
• Report a broken citation; do not repair it by finding a new source that happens to support the same claim. That is fitting evidence to a conclusion.
• A citation that cannot be checked — a source now behind a paywall, a deleted repository — is reported as uncheckable, not as passing.

Output

Open with a one-line hero (✓ <n> citations checked, <n> stale or ⚠ <n> misquoted), then exactly these sections:

1. ## Moved — each citation whose ref advanced, with the new ref.
2. ## Vanished — each source that is gone.
3. ## Misquoted — each locator whose text no longer matches, with both texts.
4. ## Changed — each measurement that produced a different number, with both.

End with an AskUserQuestion panel offering next steps (for example: revise the overturned claims, re-pin the moved ones, stop here) — skip the panel only in plan mode.