Provenance before promotion
RESEARCH MEMORY
A conversation archive remembers the path. Exporting it does not crown it as canon.
Four boundaries
CHAT ARCHIVE ≠ CANON. A conversation is a source layer. It may contain a hypothesis, a decision, an error, an abandoned path or simply a moment of thinking.
CONVERSATION ≠ VERIFIED DECISION. A decision enters canon only through explicit provenance, semantic diff, verification and an appropriate status.
REPEATED IDEA ≠ PROMOTED METHOD. Repetition records the history of attention; it does not increase evidence strength.
ARCHIVED ≠ PUBLIC. Presence in research memory is not permission to publish. Privacy, the Publication Firewall and Owner review remain separate gates.
What the memory should preserve
Useful source fields include source ID or URL, creation and export time, context, claim origin, status at the time of the conversation and links to later documents or decisions. Contradictions between conversations should not be silently cleaned away: they may be evidence of system evolution.
Memory is not there so the past is always right. It is there so we can see where and why we changed our mind.