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The khatma U-curve
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
The khatma U-curve. This connects the diplomatics of multi-session audition certificates (samaʿat) with the incentive structure of certification. A samaʿ record for a long book lists who attended which sessions, and the legal and spiritual payoff was concentrated at the end: transmission rights vested at completion, the khatma session carried baraka and public visibility, and scribes recorded partial attendance with exception formulas rather than striking names. Auditors therefore had reason to drift away in the middle of a long book and return for the close. Attendance across sessions should not decay monotonically, as ordinary lecture audiences do; it should be U-shaped, and the U is a fingerprint of certification-driven rather than curiosity-driven attendance.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In audition certificates recording four or more sessions for a single work, final-session attendance exceeds the mid-course minimum session attendance by at least 50% in a majority of certificates, and final-session attendance reaches at least 80% of first-session attendance in a majority of certificates. Primary clause: the final-over-minimum excess of at least 50% in a majority of multi-session certificates; the verdict follows it. Secondary: the U is deeper (larger mid-course sag) for longer works, measured by session count.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the published corpus of Damascene audition certificates, Muʿjam al-samaʿat al-Dimashqiyya (Leder, al-Sawwas, and al-Sagharji, Damascus 1996, certificates of 550-750 AH), counting listed names session by session.
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries); 218-title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts/dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w03_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W03 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Hirschler and the Audition Certificates Platform (5,660+ certificates) have quantified samaʿ attendance and social composition, and Leder's Damascene corpus is exactly the proposed kill dataset, but no one has tested a session-by-session U-shaped attendance profile as a fingerprint of certification-driven attendance.
Predictions
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