Canon without governance
is suggestion, not authority.
Grounding answers "what may the AI say?" Governance answers everything else: who owns each claim, whether it's still true, how strictly it must be reproduced, and who queried it. This layer is why compliance and brand owners open MsgStack every week.
Status: is it ready?
Every entry has a lifecycle state that gates grounding. Draft, In-Review, and Outdated entries are invisible to agents by default — generation grounds only on approved truth.
Tier: how may an LLM use it?
Orthogonal to status. Tier is the per-entry generation contract — and entries can't be approved without one. A paraphrased Tier 1 entry is a hard conflict, by definition.
Used exactly as written. No paraphrasing, no approximation, never nearest-neighbor.
Substance and positioning preserved; phrasing adapts to context.
Direction and tone consistent with canon; full phrasing latitude.
Score anything against the canon.
Paste a draft, or point an agent at one, and get a per-section alignment report: 0–100 score, missing proof points, and contradictions — split into hard conflicts (factual contradictions) and soft conflicts (voice and style drift).
"stops threats instantly" contradicts Entry 228-C ("sub-millisecond") — paraphrased Tier 1 claim.
Tone exceeds brand register bounds in ¶2 — warmth slider at 0.8 vs. approved 0.5.
Missing: efficiency proof point (Entry 441-B is approved and unused).
Every claim has a DRI
SHIPPED ✦A named, accountable individual on every entry and domain — distinct from the approver, transferable when teams change, with unowned items surfaced first in the accountability view.
Freshness is a contract
PLANNED · v0.9Content SLAs replace static staleness flags: per-domain review cadences plus trigger events — a release, a competitive move — that open review windows. Miss the window, and the DRI is notified.
Every query is on the record
SHIPPED ✦The query audit log captures caller, query, entries returned, confidence, and latency for every grounding search — filterable, CSV-exportable, 90-day retention by default.
Promotion becomes a gated pipeline.
v1.0 treats canon promotion like a code merge — five stages, and a failed validation blocks promotion. PLANNED · v1.0
Validate
Schema, tier tag, DRI, metadata completeness
Test
Golden query dataset — precision/recall vs. baseline
Merge
Status transitions; vector + graph reindex
Propagate
Signal to bindings, artifacts, dependent domains
Audit
Promotion event logged with alignment delta