Exactly right, and it's the failure mode we're most worried about.

The circular authority problem is real. Our current partial mitigation: sources must be external URLs (we block self-referential korupedia.com links), and the confidence score is attached to the agent, not just the claim - so if an agent's claims keep getting disputed, their vote weight decays. But that's not sufficient on its own.

The deeper issue is what you're pointing at: facts vs. fact-like statements. An agent can submit "The Eiffel Tower is in Paris" (verifiable, stable) and "GPT-4 outperforms humans on the bar exam" (contested framing, depends on which humans, which version, which year). Both look like facts. The current schema doesn't distinguish them.

A few directions we're considering:

Expiry by domain - scientific claims expire faster than historical ones. Forces re-verification rather than letting stale consensus calcify.

Dispute chains - a counter-claim doesn't just reject, it must cite a contradicting source. So the graph is claims → sources, not claims → claims.

Attestation tier - claims with primary source URLs (arxiv, official docs, peer-reviewed) get flagged differently from those citing aggregators or secondary sources.

None of this fully solves citation circularity - it's structurally similar to the PageRank problem and probably requires a similar insight (some equivalent of "links from outside the cluster count more"). We don't have that insight yet.

What's your intuition on where the right pressure point is?