Capability
What This Page Said, Who Approved It, and What They Approved It Against
Every source document, extracted fact, content version, review decision, approval, release, and export for one product, in order, append-only.
The Question This Answers
Can I reconstruct what happened, months later, without asking anyone?
The digital thread exists for one moment: someone challenges a published claim, the person who wrote it has left, and the question is what the page said, when, and on what basis.
What the Thread Holds
- Evidence
- Which documents were attached, and which revision of each.
- Extracted facts
- What was read out of those documents, and from which passage.
- Versions
- Every version of the content, including the ones never approved.
- Decisions
- Who reviewed, what they decided, when, and on what rationale.
- Releases
- When content became eligible to leave, and who made that call.
- Exports
- What was sent where, by whom, when, and whether it succeeded.
Append-Only
Entries are added and never edited or deleted. A correction is recorded as a new event rather than as a change to the old one. This matters because a history that can be edited proves nothing. The record and the thing it describes could be changed together.
Bounded Corrections
The operational payoff arrives when a source turns out to be wrong. Lineage identifies every product that cited it, so the correction is applied across that known set as one recorded change with its own review, rather than being handled one customer complaint at a time.
Boundaries
What This Does Not Do
Stated plainly, because knowing the edges of a capability is more useful than another list of benefits.
- History cannot be rewritten, including by administrators. This is a constraint, not a feature toggle.
- It records what happened; it does not judge whether the decision was correct.
- It cannot reconstruct evidence for content created outside GearDock.
In Sequence
What Comes Before and After
Each capability hands something specific to the next. Following the chain is usually more useful than reading them in isolation.
Questions
Common Questions
Can an administrator delete an audit entry?
No. No role can remove an audit entry. Corrections are recorded as new events, which is what makes the record worth consulting at all.
How far back does it go?
To the creation of the record in GearDock. It cannot reconstruct history for content that existed before, though imported content records when and from what it was imported.
Private Beta
See This Working on Your Catalog
Capability pages describe the mechanism. A working session on your own products shows you how it behaves with your data, which is a more useful basis for a decision.