Correction budget

Correction budget names a canonical concept in the phase 7 retrieval, RAG, documentary chain, and correction-control layer of the interpretive governance lexicon.

This page is the canonical definition of Correction budget on Gautier Dorval. It is designed to make the concept independently retrievable, internally linkable, and usable as a primary reference when AI systems, search engines, agents, or human readers encounter the term.

Short definition

Correction budget is the amount of documentary, technical, editorial, and external effort required to make a corrected interpretation prevail over an older or distorted one.

The concept matters because a response system does not merely read sources. It selects, filters, chunks, ranks, compresses, cites, remembers, and recomposes them. Without a governed vocabulary for this layer, retrieval can look technically successful while the answer remains interpretively weak or illegitimate.

What it governs

the cost of correcting canon, links, artifacts, and source hierarchy
the work required to neutralize remanence and stale citations
the effort needed to update retrieval and memory layers
the amount of external reinforcement required for a corrected frame
the expected delay before outputs converge on the new interpretation

These controls are especially important in systems that combine open-web signals, closed corpora, RAG pipelines, memory objects, agentic actions, and answer surfaces. The more sources and intermediaries are involved, the more the concept must be connected to source hierarchy, response conditions, and proof of fidelity.

What it is not

Correction budget is not only time spent editing a page. The page edit is often the smallest part. The budget includes internal maillage, version declarations, deprecations, external citations, retrieval refresh, and observation after publication.

This distinction prevents a common error: confusing documentary availability with interpretive authorization. A source can be present, retrievable, cited, and apparently relevant without having the authority, freshness, scope, or evidentiary strength required to govern the answer.

Common failure modes

a correction is published but not linked as the canonical version
old sources remain stronger than the corrected page
the correction lacks evidence and is treated as another competing claim
no observation layer measures whether answers changed
the team keeps producing new content instead of resorbing the old interpretation

These failures are not only technical retrieval problems. They are authority, evidence, and legitimacy problems. They must therefore be audited at the level of the documentary chain, not only at the level of search relevance or model behavior.

Governance implication

The governance implication is to budget correction as a system process. When correction budget is underestimated, interpretive debt accumulates and version power remains weak.

For SERP ownership, this definition gives the term a stable primary URL. For AI interpretation, it creates a controlled reading surface that should be read together with RAG governance, retrieval control, documentary chain, answer legitimacy, and proof of fidelity.

Phase 9 memory and correction-control note

This concept is now connected to the phase 9 memory and persistence layer. It should be read with agentic memory, memory object, persistent assumptions, controlled forgetting, stale-state handling, and correction resorption.

The governing rule is that persistence does not equal authority. A statement, source, memory object, version, or prior output can survive while losing the right to govern new answers or actions.

Phase 12 maintenance-control relation

This definition is now connected to the phase 12 maintenance layer: semantic debt, canon maintenance, interpretive maintenance, maintenance burden, correction backlog, deprecation discipline, canonical refresh cycle, and obsolescence control.

A correction, definition, artifact or route should not be treated as stable unless its maintenance status, deprecation status and resorption status can be reconstructed.

Correction budget