Outcomes and reasons

A decision carries three independent fields. Collapsing them loses the distinction the tool exists to draw.

Outcome — what the check concluded

outcome	meaning
verified	the artifact holds what the manuscript says
mismatch	the artifact was read and it disagrees
not_found	the address resolved to nothing, or to more than one thing
unchecked	no comparison ran
error	the tool failed
not_offered	the claim declared no evidence

A contradicted number and a missing extractor are both failures of a build, and they are not the same fact about a paper. A tool that reports them identically teaches its users to ignore it.

A missing quotation and a missing key

An absent quotation is a mismatch. An absent key is not_found. What separates them is what the extraction stage found.

Text pulled out of a source is the source’s own words. Comparing a quotation against them and not finding it is a comparison that ran and failed, so it is reported as one. A JSON key that does not resolve extracted nothing to compare against, so no comparison happened at all.

A source the extractor could not read is a third case, unchecked with reason extractor_missing. A missing tool is a fact about your machine, not about the paper.

Reason — why

Nineteen machine-readable codes, so a tool can route by cause:

passage_present   value_match        passage_absent      value_mismatch
pointer_absent    column_absent      row_absent          row_ambiguous
row_selector_invalid                 selector_not_scalar format_unsupported
wrong_page        value_not_numeric  extractor_missing   artifact_missing
artifact_unreadable                  artifact_undeclared backend_defect
not_offered

Four of those produce unchecked and three produce not_found. Without the reason, artifact_undeclared — a mistake in your manifest — is indistinguishable from artifact_missing, a file that is genuinely absent. One is a defect in the declaration; the other is a fact about the work.

Validity — whether the decision describes the declared artifact

validity	meaning
authoritative	the bytes read are the bytes pinned
unpinned_artifact	no digest was recorded, so the file read may not be the file meant
broken_pin	the file read is provably not the file that was pinned
artifact_absent	nothing exists at the declared path

A comparison against a changed file still runs, and its result is still reported — a diagnostic is more useful than a blank — but it is marked non-authoritative. Every number can agree and the report still fail, because they agreed with a document nobody pinned.