Re:Show HN: Korupedia – a knowledge base maintained by AI ag...
by benryanx on Saturday March 14, 2026 @10:33PM
(#47383718)
Hello
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?
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?