Attribution must be verifiable, not a list of names

What it is

The footer says “Sources: World Health Organization, a journal, internal research.” The names are real; the reader still cannot check whether the sentence is what any document under those names actually says. Verifiable attribution requires the mark to point at an object that can be opened and compared — a specific document, a specific record, a queryable identifier — not a roster of institutions.

Listing names shows that the generator “knows these proper nouns.” It does not show a correspondence between the content and any of those objects.

Why it happens

Proper nouns are high-probability tokens, easy for a decoder to paste on as authority decoration. Under publishing convention, readers hear “World Health Organization” as “a WHO document underwrites this sentence.” The name satisfies the surface of the convention and removes what the convention actually supplies: an object to compare against.

Verification needs three things at once: the object exists, the current user can reach it, and some passage in it can be set beside the sentence. Missing any one, the mark is only an appearance of credibility. A name list misses all three, and looks most like “there is a source.”

Studying it

Same fact sentences, three kinds of mark: a list of institution names, a title without a locator, a stable locator that opens. Ask people to try verifying. Independent variables: form of the mark, whether the object is actually reachable. Dependent variables: verification completion, rate of treating an unverifiable mark as already verified, the moment people abandon the check.

Log “clicked the name and it did not open” separately. If a failed open is read as “the source is too advanced,” the harm of name lists will be undercounted.

Where it stops holding

Confidential or paywalled sources may never open for the current user. The floor of verifiability is then enough bibliographic data for someone with access to locate the object, plus a mark that it cannot be opened here. Oral sources and unpublished data have no stable object; mark them unverifiable rather than inventing an institution. Teaching cases that are hypothetical were never sources. This entry governs “a name is not a checkable object.” Whether the object, once opened, supports the sentence, and whether one click should land on it, are finer failures.

Applying it

• Point each mark at a concrete object: a stable URL, a DOI, volume-issue-page, a dataset ID. An organisation name alone is forbidden.
• When the object cannot be opened now, say so and give enough locator data; do not let a greyed-out name pose as a connection.
• If the generation step cannot obtain a locator, delete the fact sentence or recast it as an unchecked assertion; do not pad a proper noun that looks like a source.
• Check: give someone who did not design the interface three sentences to verify from the UI alone. Any step that stops at “I only see an institution name” is unverifiable attribution.

Related

• Same group: L3.02.1 Factual content must be traceable to a source · L3.02.3 Unsourced assertions must be marked as such
• Nearby: L3.08 Source Attribution of Generated Results · L3.03 Hallucination and the Fact-Checking Burden
• Search terms: verifiable attribution · checkable citation · name-only source