Candidates and canon

The human gate

CanonTracker keeps two kinds of fact apart. A candidate is a proposal, drawn in pencil. Canon is what your team accepted, drawn in ink. Nothing becomes canon without a person deciding it, and that person's name stays on the decision.

• The AI reads your sources and proposes candidates. It never accepts anything.
• Conflict checks, impact analysis, Ask in Canon mode and continuity checks read accepted canon only, so a candidate can't cause or hide a problem until someone accepts it.
• Deciding is for editors, admins and owners. Viewers can read the queue but not decide. See Roles and permissions.

Where a fact can be

• Pending: waiting in Review. Accept it with Accept, fix it first with Edit & accept, or turn it down with Reject… and a reason.
• Canon: accepted. It shows on Canon, on entity pages, in the graph and timeline, and in exports.
• Rejected: kept for the audit trail but never part of canon. Review lists rejected candidates with who rejected them and why.
• Superseded: an older version of a canon fact that an applied change replaced. It is kept, never deleted, and listed on the Superseded tab of Canon. See Change impact.

Where candidates come from

• AI extraction: every imported or saved document is read by the AI, and its candidates go to Review marked "Proposed by AI". Re-extract on a document runs it again and adds only candidates the project doesn't have yet.
• By hand: select words in a source, choose Add fact, then Add to canon (you are the one deciding) or Send to review (a teammate decides).
• Agents over MCP: a token's proposals arrive in Review with an Agent proposal badge and the person the token belongs to. See Agents & API.
• Research: Promote to a candidate on a research note saves the note as a read-only source and sends a pending candidate quoting it. See Research.
• Continuity checks: a finding canon doesn't cover yet can be sent with Send to review.

Sample canon

Some sample projects come with facts already in canon. They carry a Sample canon (preloaded) badge: their quotes are verified against the sources, but no person reviewed or decided them. On Canon you can filter them apart with the origin filter.

Agents propose, people decide

An agent token is either Propose only or Full access. A propose-only token can read, check and propose; nothing it does becomes canon. A full-access token can also make editorial edits as the person who made it (documents, pages, notes, the Library), marked "via agent" in the audit log. Neither can accept, reject or edit a candidate, apply a change, judge a conflict or merge pages: a person decides in CanonTracker. Decisions made through an agent before this rule still show "via agent".