Sourcing standards

A citation is a promise: follow this link and you will find this fact. These standards govern which links we are willing to make that promise with.

Order of preference

1. Primary sources. Peer-reviewed papers and preprints, technical reports, model cards, official documentation, company announcements, regulatory filings, court documents, and benchmark leaderboards for their own results.
2. Established technical press and analysis. Reporting and peer analysis with named authors and editorial standards, used especially for events, context, and claims a primary source would self-servingly frame.
3. Everything else, sparingly. Personal blogs and social media posts only when the author is the subject or a recognized authority (a lab announcing on X, a researcher explaining their own paper), cited as what they are.

SEO content farms, uncredited aggregators, and AI-generated summary sites are not acceptable sources at any position. Marketing claims are attributed as claims ("the company states"), not repeated as facts.

How citations are wired

• Claims carry inline markers like [3] pointing into the numbered References list at the end of every article, so a specific sentence maps to a specific source.
• Statistics keep their date and origin in the text ("as of March 2026", "according to the v3 technical report") so they age visibly rather than silently.
• Cited links are monitored for rot; when a source goes offline we repoint the reference to an archived snapshot rather than leaving a dead promise.

For contributors

Suggesting an edit that adds a fact? Add the source with it (the editor toolbar has an insert-citation button). Reviewers check suggestions against these standards before publishing; unsourced substantive claims are declined, however plausible they sound.