What this note is
The companion note at /library/twenty-two-gates/ introduces the six integrity families. This note does the second-order work for the first family: Sourcing.
Sourcing is five gates — G·01, G·02, G·03, G·19, G·20. Together they govern every numeric and institutional claim in a VERIDEX-validated deliverable. They do the most rule-bound work in the standard, and they fail the most unforgivingly. A deliverable can carry sophisticated modelling and still fail Sourcing. A deliverable that fails Sourcing fails the whole standard.
This note explains what each of the five gates is doing, what the family defends against, and what an honest sourcing layer looks like at the artefact level.
The five gates, restated
| Gate | What it requires |
|---|---|
| G·01 | Every figure traces to a source. No numeric claim stands without a citation that resolves to a primary or near-primary document. |
| G·02 | Every named institution is verifiable. Banks, regulators, courts, agencies, registries — each appears under its formal name and resolves to a public record. |
| G·03 | Every statistic carries its identifier. National accounts, census tables, regulatory filings — cited by table number, filing reference, or equivalent locator. |
| G·19 | Every source’s tier is disclosed. The reader sees whether the source is primary (the agency that produced the figure), secondary (a publication that quotes the agency), or tertiary (an aggregator). |
| G·20 | Every source carries temporal provenance. The date of publication, the date of access, and the date the underlying figures cover. |
The five gates are sequential in audit order. A figure that fails G·01 cannot pass G·19 or G·20. A figure that fails G·19 fails the family even if the citation resolves.
What the family defends against
The Sourcing family defends against the most common analytical failure in the field — figures introduced into a document without provenance, used as if they were ground truth, and amplified through downstream sections of the analysis until the original looseness is impossible to recover.
The pathology has three classic forms.
- The unattributed magnitude. “The sector is worth roughly fifty billion dollars.” No table, no agency, no year. The figure may be approximately right. The deliverable cannot tell the reader whether it is.
- The borrowed citation. “According to the World Bank, GDP grew 4.1%.” The World Bank publishes thousands of figures across hundreds of indicator series. Without the indicator code, the year, and the table reference, the citation does not resolve.
- The temporal slip. A 2019 figure cited in a 2026 deliverable, with no acknowledgement that the underlying conditions have moved. The number may still be the most recent published figure. The deliverable has to say so explicitly.
Each form is a refusal of one of the five Sourcing gates. The family is the standard’s answer to all three at once.
Worked example — the Foundation Project bank verification letters
The clearest worked example of the Sourcing family operating at full strength is the Foundation Project dossier, embedded as primary-source artefacts at /track-record/2017-foundation-venu/.
The dossier reproduces five Texas First Bank verification letters, documenting deposits to S4TF, LTD, account #10016236, between March 2013 and June 2018. Each letter is signed by Billie Jean Higginbotham, Banking Center Manager / AVP. Cumulative deposits over the period: $2,065,367.96. Average annual: $386,638.56. Average monthly: $32,219.88.
Read against the Sourcing family:
- G·01 — figures trace to source. The dollar figures are not summarised from secondary reporting. They come from letters issued by the bank that held the account. The letters are reproduced as scanned artefacts, not retyped.
- G·02 — institutions verifiable. Texas First Bank is a named institution. The signatory’s title and role at the bank are stated. The account number is on each letter.
- G·03 — statistics named. Each figure is named by year, by period (full year, partial year, cumulative), and by what it measures (deposits, not revenue, not balance).
- G·19 — source tier disclosed. The bank verification letter is a primary-tier source for deposits to that account. The dossier says so in the artefact’s caption.
- G·20 — temporal provenance tagged. Each letter carries its date of issue. Each figure inside the letter carries the period it covers. The reader can read the November 2015 letter and know that it documents deposits from March 2013 through October 2015, signed at a date inside the period the data covers.
Five gates, five separate disciplines, all visible to the reader on the artefact itself. The dossier is the family’s worked example.
What the family does not do
The Sourcing family does not adjudicate whether a figure is correct. It adjudicates whether a reader can reach the source, identify the source’s tier, and see when the source was published.
A figure that passes all five Sourcing gates can still be wrong — the underlying source can be wrong, the source can be miscited, the source can be misinterpreted. The remaining five families address those failure modes. The Sourcing family’s job is to make every other family’s job possible.
If Sourcing fails, the rest of the standard cannot run. A deliverable whose figures do not trace cannot be audited for analytical drift (G·04, G·05) or modelled consistency (G·08, G·11) or counterfactual rigour (G·09, G·16). The Sourcing family is the foundation. The other twenty gates rest on it.
What an honest sourcing layer looks like
In a finished VERIDEX-validated deliverable, the sourcing layer is visible at three depths.
- Inline. Every numeric claim carries a citation in the same sentence. The citation names the source, the table or filing, and the date.
- Footnoted. Every citation expands, in a footnote or endnote, into the full reference — agency, document title, publication date, access date, URL or document identifier where applicable.
- Disclosed at the artefact level. The deliverable’s audit trail lists, in the front matter or in a dedicated annex, the tier of each source class used in the analysis. Primary, secondary, tertiary — counted and disclosed.
A reader who wants to audit the figures can do so without leaving the document, then leave the document and reach the underlying source on the same path the analyst took. That is the standard.
Cross-references
- The full Reader’s Guide to all six families. /library/twenty-two-gates/
- Full gate enumeration. /methodology/validation/
- The Sourcing family’s worked example, on the artefact page. /track-record/2017-foundation-venu/
- The Foundation dossier, as a single library entry. /library/the-foundation-dossier/