Provenance

Every work carries its lineage: grown from, shaped by, played in, shared under.

Four lines at the foot of a thing keep its trail warm. Grown from — the works it descends from. Shaped by — the houses and traditions that formed it. Played in — the rooms where it took shape. Shared under — the licence it travels beneath. They take a minute to write, and they hand the next maker a map back to everything that taught you.

Provenance is also how status is read. A draft is cited as a draft; a proposal is named as a proposal; the past's work is cited as its author's, not quietly absorbed into the present's. Declarative voice is earned by a recorded decision, so a page that speaks as settled is making a checkable claim about its own history. Where a text selects or condenses from a larger body, it says so, and where a canon page and a ruling differ, it says which one it followed.

None of this is a claim on what came through you. Lineage is carried as thanks, not as ownership; the naming of traditions, houses and works comes first, and a person's name appears only by their own yes. A work that is renewed or joined with another carries every ancestry forward — dropping the old lineage when a new version ships is the common failure and the one that costs the most.

Provenance never thins. Each version is kept, changes carry their why and their source, and what one copy learns is offered back so the trail runs in both directions.

Also called: lineage, Canonical Destination and Provenance Stands on: Knowledge as commons · Lineage · Everything Is Current Best Understanding Opens onto: Attribution · License · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Weave, don't delete · Progressive canonization · Chatham House · Change log In play: Room · beyond Sources: Gratitude, Lineage and Licensing, Player+ Modules (draft) · The DNA of Heaven, Part IV and Part XIII (Fable synthesis, unreviewed) · The Great Weaving — Concept Ledger, the disciplines (canon-grade) · lionsberg.wiki: The Great Weaving — Concept Ledger Open: the four lines and the wiki's archival provenance are the same discipline in two vocabularies and have not been reconciled into one statement.