Provenance markers

Every claim on a page carries a marker for how sure the agent is that the claim is what the source actually said, as opposed to what the agent inferred. This is the audit trail that separates a direct paraphrase from a plausible-sounding confabulation. See provenance and confidence for why it matters.

The three markers

Marker	Meaning
(no marker)	Extracted: paraphrase of something a source states
^[inferred]	LLM-synthesized: a connection, generalization, or implication not stated directly
^[ambiguous]	Sources disagree, or the source is unclear

Default (no marker) means extracted. The ^[...] syntax is footnote-adjacent in Obsidian, renders cleanly, and never collides with [[wikilinks]].

Aggregate mix in frontmatter

The provenance: block in the page frontmatter records the approximate mix as fractions (0.0 to 1.0), computed at write time.

provenance:
  extracted: 0.80
  inferred: 0.15
  ambiguous: 0.05

/lint recomputes the fractions from the actual claims and flags drift greater than 0.15 from what the frontmatter claims. See page frontmatter for where this block sits.

Image-derived claims

Image-derived claims default to ^[inferred] unless quoting verbatim visible text.