A citation span is valid only when its text, byte offsets, page label, and document version come from the same parse. For an edtech policy lookup system that aggregates catalogs and compliance documents from several sources, reject an ingestion run that cannot preserve that lineage; do not patch page numbers after retrieval.

TL;DR: re-parse each source version once, derive chunks and citation metadata from that parse, and atomically replace the indexed version. Keep the prior version available for rollback. After any parser or chunker change, spot-check ten citations against the rendered source because this failure is silent: retrieval can return exactly the right policy sentence while the UI opens the wrong page.

This is a data-provenance problem before it is a ranking problem.…