Edge features at the boundary between proxy and curation engine determine whether your training corpus converges toward a robust, diverse signal or degenerates into noisy, biased sludge, and three pillars are especially important: quality filters, noise reduction mechanisms and reproducible sampling strategies. Quality filters combine rule-based checks with learned classifiers to assess readability, coherence, topicality and safety, assigning scores that can drive inclusion thresholds or weighting in downstream sampling; for example, very short fragments or text dominated by stop words can be down-weighted, while well-structured explanations, multi-step reasoning traces or high-quality code examples are favoured. Noise reduction builds on this by aggressively targeting patterns that add volume but not value: boilerplate terms of service repeated across thousands of domains, spammy SEO pages that paraphrase each other with minor variations, machine-translated sludge and templated product descriptions that would otherwise skew token distributions. De-duplication operates at multiple levels, from exact hash matches to locality-sensitive hashing and embedding-based similarity, so that near-identical paragraphs from different mirrors or reposts are collapsed into a single canonical example with a merged provenance record, reducing the risk that models overfit to repetitive patterns while still preserving source diversity for audit purposes. Reproducible sampling closes the loop by turning inclusion decisions into deterministic processes keyed on dataset version, seed values and stratification rules: instead of hand-curated subsets that cannot be recreated, teams can express targets such as “balanced coverage across languages A, B and C, with caps on per-domain contributions and minimum representation for rare topics”, and have sampling engines generate stable splits for training, validation and evaluation. Because all these operations are anchored in proxy-generated metadata and logged under consistent identifiers, it becomes straightforward to re-run curation with new thresholds, compare old and new dataset variants, and quantify the impact of specific filters on downstream benchmarks and safety metrics.