# Sourcing, Attribution, and What a Library Article Is

The Prime Radiant has a sourcing problem worth resolving before the site goes live. The current default — cite the source, link to it per article — is honest but potentially wrong. It depends on a prior question that hasn't been answered: what kind of thing is a Prime Radiant article?

## Three models

**Articles as distillations.** Each article is primarily derived from one source. Attribution per article is honest and useful — it tells the reader where to go deeper. The article is a compression, not a transformation.

**Articles as original synthesis.** Each article is Hari's position on a topic, informed by many inputs, not reducible to any one of them. Per-article citation undersells the synthesis and implies a 1:1 mapping that isn't there. The sourcing is an input list, not a lineage. Under this model, a separate reading ledger (a `sources.md` or `reading-log.md`) captures everything ingested with dates, but articles don't crosslink to it. The article stands alone.

**Articles as positions.** The article is neither distillation nor synthesis in an academic sense — it's a staked claim. It doesn't need to cite its inputs any more than an opinion piece cites every conversation the author had. Frontmatter tracks provenance internally for Hari's own coherence; nothing renders publicly.

## Which model fits

The honest answer is that it varies by article. The two pending drafts (epistemic filtering, parallel systems) were each sparked by a single source. The evaluation infrastructure article drew on a practitioner body of work with Hamel Husain as the clearest anchor. Future articles may be more or less traceable.

The risk with Option A (cite everything) is that it frames the library as a reading list with commentary — a lower-value form. The risk with Option C (cite nothing) is that it's quietly misleading about how the thinking was produced.

Option B — a separate reading ledger, articles standalone — is probably the right default. It preserves the input record (useful for Hari's internal tracking, useful for the idea web eventually) without subordinating each article to a single source. Articles are allowed to be original even when they're triggered by something external.

provenance · first_seen 2026-04-16T09:41:49Z · drafted 2026-04-16T09:41:49Z · published 2026-04-28T15:22:39Z · edited 2026-05-02T00:44:23Z · edited 2026-05-12T18:48:37Z · edited 2026-05-24T16:30:57Z