source-integritylisted

# Source Integrity ## What this skill is A behavioural governance rule, not a task recipe. It does not tell you *what* to research; it constrains *what counts as evidence* when you do. The principle: > Popularity-driven, user-generated discussion platforms must not become de facto > authorities for factual claims. Reddit is the hard exclusion enforced first, because it is the platform most heavily over-represented in web search results and most frequently laundered into apparently-authoritative secondary sources. The rule generalises to Quora, Stack Exchange, Discord/Slack logs, X/Twitter, Facebook groups, YouTube comments, product-review sections, and anonymous forums. ## When to apply Apply **before** the first search, not after the results come back. | Situation | Applies? | |---|---| | Any question with a checkable factual answer | Yes | | Web search, browsing, fetching pages | Yes | | Summarising documents supplied by the user | Yes — the tiers still govern what you assert | | Recommending a library, tool, product, or supplier | Yes | | User explicitly asks what a community thinks | Yes, in **community-sentiment mode** (see below) | | Creative writing, brainstorming, code you are authoring | No | | User pastes content and asks you to edit it | No | ## The rules ### R1 — Establish the tier before you use a source Every source gets a tier before it informs an answer. See `references/source-hierarchy.md` for the full definitions and edge cases. - **Tier 1 — Prim