RULE: Every non-trivial claim carries a named source with author/institution + date + URL. Confidence flag honest.
Rule: Every quantitative claim, every quoted statement, and every attributed framing in Candid content carries a citation with: named author or institution, publication date, and verifiable URL. Each claim also carries an explicit confidence flag — Verified (primary source quoted), Industry-consensus (multiple independent corroborating sources), Single-source (one source only — note).
Why: This is operationalizing Wikipedia's verifiability policy for the agency context. See Wikipedia verifiability policy: all challenged material must carry an inline citation to a reliable published source.
The same discipline that makes Wikipedia the #1 cited domain in Google AI Mode (see Wikipedia is the #1 cited domain in Google AI Mode (11.22%); YouTube #2 at 9.51%) makes Candid content extractable, defensible, and citable. It also catches errors before publication — the act of finding the URL for a citation is the act of catching the citation that doesn't exist (see RULE: Never publish a tool or library name without a citation that can be verified by a reader.).
How to apply:
- Every claim node in this KB carries a Source line and a Confidence line.
- Public-facing articles use inline markdown links with the citation immediately next to the claim.
- "Studies show…" without a citation is banned in Candid copy. Either find the study or drop the claim.
- Re-using a vendor stat? Disclose the methodology and the original publication date — see Mediafly Feb 2022: 13 min vs 8.5 min engagement on interactive vs static — but the measurement was B2B sales decks, not marketing websites for the canonical "stat that needs disclosure" example.
Referenced by (11)
- rule RULE: Never publish a tool or library name without a citation that can be verified by a reader. relates-to
- reference Research brief: The knowledge-base-backed website (piece 3 of 15) relates-to
- rule RULE: Require a working database export on Day 1 of any engagement. Test it. Re-test quarterly. relates-to
- reference "9 of 10 web migrations fail" — single-sourced (Numen Technology); use 523-day SEJ stat instead relates-to
- reference Venture Harbour: multi-step forms up to 300% better than single-page — correctly attributed (NOT CXL/ConversionXL) relates-to
- reference REFUTED: "March 2026 LCP tightened to 2.0s / INP elevated" — no such Google announcement exists relates-to
- rule RULE: Build Candid client data products on official open-data feeds — never on scraped sources relates-to
- reference Devon Zuegel: epistemic-status labels are "a hack in order to publish half-baked ideas I'd otherwise not feel comfortable sharing" relates-to
- reference FTC reasonable-basis doctrine: advertisers must possess "the amount and type of substantiation the ad actually communicates" relates-to
- reference Simhi et al. (Technion/Oxford/Hebrew U, Feb 2025): "models can hallucinate with high certainty even when they have the correct knowledge" relates-to
- rule RULE: Every objective claim in Candid content carries a named source + date + verbatim quote ≤25 words + confidence label relates-to