Decision
Source nomination (G-066) is about curated, authoritative sources — a member
suggests, say, starwars.com as a canonical source for the Star Wars franchise —
not arbitrary third-party sites. Every such source is governed by a fail-closed
compliance posture:
- Permit before ingest. Before anything is pulled, fetch and archive the
source's ToS/T&C,
robots.txt, and license, and make an explicit permitted-use determination. No determination → no ingest. - Daily terms-drift monitor. A standing job diffs each source's ToS / robots / license against the archived snapshot, across every source and API in use (nominated sources, Entry 019 provider APIs, Entry 028 external references).
- Fail-closed on change. When terms change — or are unreachable or ambiguous — auto-pause that source's ingest, snapshot the new version, notify the compliance owner (G-061), and queue a re-review. Stop, don't continue.
- Keep the audit trail. Timestamped archived snapshots of every terms version mean we can always prove what the terms said on the day we ingested — legal defensibility, not just intent.
Reasoning
A curated-source strategy is only safe if compliance is continuous. Terms of service change silently; a one-time check at nomination is a future gotcha waiting to happen. Fail-closed defaults protect contributors and the Commons from inheriting a liability nobody noticed.
This is the legal-side mirror of structural drift detection (G-041): we already re-flag a pattern when a source's HTML changes, so we re-flag a source when its terms change. And it operationalizes the "respect prior work" ethic — the same reciprocity and attribution stance we apply to crawlers of our own content (Entry 030) applied to the sources we draw from.
Open threads
- Source compliance & terms-drift monitoring — the implementation (G-067).