Raw sources are the ground truth of the estate. Articles, highlights, transcripts and recordings are kept exactly as they arrived, and they are immutable. Everything else is derived, and every derived view must be able to say what it derives from.
The doctrine has two clauses. Derived views re-derive from raw. Derived views never sync with each other. Two mirrors of the same source are both honest so long as each goes back to the source. A bridge between mirrors is a loop factory.
A worked example. Reading highlights land twice: once in the vault through a reading plugin, once in the Commons through an importer. Both are derived views of the same raw service. Neither is edited as a master, and no third path will ever join them.
Annotation happens in new writing. To comment on a highlight, write a note or a page that links to it. The mirror stays a mirror. The thinking accumulates beside it.
An edited bottle returning from a friend is raw, not derived. It re-enters the estate as a fresh source to be ingested — see Bottled Guide.
# See - Three Wikis and The Thinking Lab - Memex Gardener