Confidence and alert tiers

Every triggered verdict carries a confidence between 0 and 1. Your watch sets one or two bars against it:

threshold: 0.6        # at or above this, a confirmed alert is possible
weakThreshold: 0.4    # 0.4 to 0.6 arrives labelled "unconfirmed"

The three outcomes

Tier	When	What you get
strong	Confidence ≥ threshold and every quality check passed	A normal alert: 🔔
weak	Confidence ≥ weakThreshold, or strong confidence that failed a quality check	A labelled alert: ❓ Possible update (unconfirmed)
none	Below weakThreshold, or no weak tier configured	Nothing. The run records below-threshold.

Confidence alone is never enough

A high confidence score does not by itself produce a confirmed alert. It is one of six conditions — the others are corroboration, a grounded quote, a trusted source, second-opinion agreement, and not having come from a failover model. Any one of them failing demotes the alert to the weak tier rather than firing it. The full list is in Decision rules.

Why a weak tier is useful

Without weakThreshold, a borderline finding is simply dropped and you never learn it existed. With it, you get a visibly different, low-priority message that says “something might be happening, go and look”. Many people run:

threshold: 0.6
weakThreshold: 0.4

so genuine news arrives confirmed, and early or poorly-sourced signals arrive marked as unconfirmed.

Requiring corroboration

minSources: 2

With minSources: 2, a confirmed alert additionally requires that two distinct sources contributed fresh evidence for that event. A single source reporting it is demoted to weak. This is the right setting for high-stakes watches where a single site being wrong would cost you something.

Tip

If two of your sources republish identical text, they still count as two corroborating sources — Watcher tracks every source that carried a given piece of content, not just the first one to arrive.

Choosing numbers

There is no universally correct threshold. A practical starting point:

Watch character	threshold	weakThreshold	minSources
Official feed you trust, want everything	0.5	0.3	—
Typical: a portal plus a search	0.6	0.4	—
High stakes, hate false alarms	0.7	0.5	2

Then tune with evidence rather than guesswork: label a few alerts 👍/👎 in the panel and read the accuracy summary. See The feedback loop and Tune precision.

Going deeper

• Decision rules — the exact conjunction.
• Source trust — the check that most often causes an unexpected demotion to weak.