Provenance, not aggregation
Every entry in Aravien traces to a canonical source. Wikidata and MusicBrainz form the backbone. The catalog does not grow to be large — it grows to be accurate.
What canonical means here
Each work in the catalog carries an explicit provenance ID — a Wikidata QID for film, television, and literature; a MusicBrainz release-group ID for music; an OpenLibrary key for books; a TVmaze ID for series; a Janus Films catalog entry where it applies. The IDs aren't decorative. They're how the entry is verified, deduplicated, and (when needed) corrected against the world's existing reference graph.
When two sources disagree about a fact — a year, a creator, a region — the source policy decides which provider's value is canonical for that field. The catalog records the chosen value, the source it came from, and the time it was last reconciled. A reader curious about any entry can follow the source URL and see the lineage themselves.
What we don’t do
No scraping that bypasses a provider's terms. No anonymous aggregations of “best of” lists. No algorithmic discovery surface that proposes works without an authored source rule explaining what kind of work the source is allowed to introduce.
Every provider is gated through a source-policy file with explicit content rules — what the provider may contribute (factual metadata, expressive text, creative assets), how long it may be cached, and whether it can serve as canonical authority. The default posture is conservative: a new provider has to prove itself before its rows reach the public surface.
How it shows up
Every catalog row exposes its source URL on the work-detail page. Every cross-work association carries a reason explaining why the connection holds. Where a fact is uncertain, the surface marks it; where a claim is editorial, the page says so.
The accuracy isn't a marketing claim — it's a tracked metric. The admin surface keeps a running ledger of dedup merges, suppressed entries, and reconciliation failures, and the catalog only grows when an entry passes through that ledger.