All 4 manifest candidates clean-separate (12/12 NEG catch at 0/14 POS FP),
so 'reranker discriminates Zionist-entity-style mis-cites' is a property
of MS-MARCO-trained rerankers as a class — not the specific L-6 I picked
first. Ranked by separation margin (per §7 #18: separation beats raw):
ms-marco-electra-base +5.349 ← new primary
BAAI/bge-reranker-base +3.076
ms-marco-MiniLM-L-6-v2 +3.053 (previous primary, demoted)
ms-marco-MiniLM-L-12-v2 +2.663 (worst — deeper ≠ better)
Manifest primary moved to electra-base for the cushion. demote_below_score
STAYS null — clean candidate-bench thresholds don't predict real-pipeline
behavior (the §7 #18→#27 history is 6 verdict flips on the NLI side);
§3.2.2 step 2 (real-traffic shadow sweep on pooled bench-qa STRICT) is
what sets it. Expect a walk-back. Reranker still doesn't catch the
Kilimanjaro/Mount-Kenya recombination (aboutness ≠ truth-of-attribution;
that's #000049 territory). fox's bench-maxing correction applied.