If the note is not citable, it is a vibe
Research notes should be boring enough to be true: timestamp, build, method, and the sentence the player used—not the sentence marketing wished they used.
We store conflicts next to consensual truths. A designer who overrules a test with a hunch is not evil; the journal needs the hunch on paper so later evidence can overrule the overrule. Without that paper trail, the team argues about ghosts.
A journal page should be legible in five years: use stable nouns, avoid nicknames for builds that will not exist next quarter, and link to a commit hash, not a vibe.