Citation rules — steps

Record status

Record ID

field-guide:citation-rules

Parent lifecycle

candidate

Page lane

plan

Lane lifecycle

proposed

Owner

Socrates

Owner role

Not separately recorded

Owner status

Not separately recorded

Qualification result

NOT RUN · held for evidence and human review

Working browser surface: Field guides — documentation — Inspect the guide and persist local checkpoints. This route is local-only; provider, credential, database, customer, publication, deployment, and production effects remain held.

Ordered procedure

1. Create a proposed field-guide record owned by the designated agent or named human owner; do not treat the native Field Guides route as proof of a connected backend.
2. State the question, claim set, intended audience, related job, and action boundary before collecting or mapping evidence.
3. Register each supplied source reference as a source-labelled note or file reference, preserving its locator, origin, provenance, revision, lifecycle, and SHA-256 when present.
4. Separate source identity from claim interpretation: record the exact claim, its scope, and whether it is a quote, faithful paraphrase, comparison, inference, or unresolved question.
5. Map every material claim to a precise source locator. If a locator cannot be supplied from the source record, mark the claim unsupported or held rather than filling the gap.
6. Compare sources only after each source has an independent identity and claim map; record agreement, disagreement, scope mismatch, and missing evidence separately.
7. Mark uncertainty at the claim level using explicit labels such as supported, partially supported, disputed, not established, or held for review.
8. Create a to-do for every missing locator, unresolved disagreement, stale revision, absent hash, or required human review. Use dueAt and priority where a deadline is known.
9. Run the citation checkpoint: confirm that every material claim has a source mapping, every source mapping identifies its origin, and every uncertainty statement is visible beside the affected claim.
10. Run the provenance checkpoint: confirm that record revisions, source SHA-256 values when available, source locators, attachments, links, and lifecycle state are preserved without claiming database authority or publication.
11. Submit any consequential citation-quality decision as Needs review in Approvals; local approval does not authorize external publication, provider writes, customer indexing, or production effects.
12. Append an Agent Log receipt describing the work performed, authority used, held actions, failures, and remaining open loops.
13. Complete the guide only when all acceptance tests pass, unresolved items are explicitly held or assigned, and the final record remains proposal-only.

Deadline and chronology rules

• If a citation gap blocks a lesson pathway or source comparison, assign a to-do immediately with high priority and a human-owned dueAt.
• If no deadline is supplied, do not invent one; use an open-loop to-do with completion state incomplete.
• Review citation mappings whenever the source revision, source SHA-256, locator, or claim wording changes.
• Do not mark a guide complete while a material claim is unsupported, disputed, or missing a locator unless the item is explicitly held and assigned for review.

Failure branches during execution

• A source locator may be too broad to support the claim; narrow the locator or hold the claim.
• A source title or label may be mistaken for evidence; require a locator and provenance instead.
• A source hash may be absent or unverifiable; never invent one and mark verification held.
• A later revision may invalidate a prior citation; preserve revisions and reopen review.
• Paraphrase may introduce interpretation; label interpretation separately from source-supported text.
• Conflicting sources may be falsely harmonized; retain disagreement and scope differences.
• A local approval may be mistaken for publication or qualification; state that external effects remain held.
• A named route may be mistaken for a connected backend; treat routes as prototypes or indexes according to the observed contract.
• Sensitive source material may be exposed through visibility or attachments; respect local/private partitioning and do not imply protected storage.
• Instrument output may be treated as authoritative; use the checksum verifier only for supplied digest comparison and preserve its educational or verification scope.

Sources and evidence

These pointers bind the page to evidence. They do not grant authority or collapse verification into deployment.

• source_record:field-guide:citation-rules
• agents/index.html#socrates
• field-guide:citation-rules:plan
• Observed native contract: records preserve canonical IDs, origin, source locators, source SHA-256, provenance, revision, lifecycle, tags, links, attachments, and record revisions
• Observed native contract: PointGuard is a persistent cross-app context surface while specialist apps remain execution and canonical-record owners
• Observed app route: /app/notebook/field-guides/
• Observed app route: /app/notebook/notes/
• Observed app route: /app/notebook/files/
• Observed app route: /app/notebook/to-dos/
• Observed app route: /app/notebook/approvals/
• Observed app route: /app/notebook/agent-logs/
• Allowed instrument: checksum-verifier