---
title: "Verifiability"
url: "https://caper.network/wiki/policy/verifiability"
updated: 2026-09-09
last_verified: 2026-08-19
license: CC-BY-4.0
license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Verifiability

**Verifiability** is the first standard on the Caper wiki: the threshold for including material is whether readers can check it against a reliable, published source, not whether an editor believes it is true.[[1]](#ref-1) Any statement likely to be challenged, and every quotation, should carry an inline citation.

## Reliable sources

Prefer primary documentation, project repositories, peer-reviewed work, and the on-chain record. The ledger is itself a primary source: a caper's treasury balance, a proposal outcome, or an executed grant can be cited directly, and the on-chain blocks a page can embed (timeline, grants ledger, funding graph) re-resolve that record on every render instead of restating it in prose. See [the machine-readable DAO](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/machine-readable-dao) for what a machine-readable record buys a reader, and [EIP-4824](https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4824) for the interface that standardises it.[[2]](#ref-2) Marketing copy and unattributed posts are weak sources.

## Sources that answer and still fail

An HTTP 200 is not verification. A source can load, look complete, and still fail to support the claim that cites it. These are the checks this wiki runs before it treats a link as a citation, each one earned from a citation that had already shipped.

- **The unit of death is the route, not the host.** A live apex domain vouches for nothing beneath it: a project's marketing site can answer while the grants portal, docs subdomain, or app route the citation actually points at is gone. Probe the route being cited, not the domain.
- **A documented mechanism and a used mechanism are different claims.** Documentation outlives the contract it describes. A factory can be disabled, a portal can stop accepting submissions, and a governance module can be migrated off while the page explaining it stays live, complete and accurate in the present tense. Settle usage against the deployment registry or the contract itself, not the write-up.
- **A permission set is a primary source, and it is the one nobody reads.** Who is allowed to open a vote is a fact about a DAO that no proposal record contains. Snapshot exposes each space's proposal-creation validation and member allowlist through its public API,[[3]](#ref-3) and on-chain governors encode the same thing as a proposal threshold. A DAO described as open to token holders may in practice restrict proposal creation to a handful of addresses.
- **A permissionless surface is a spam surface, so the denominator is part of the measurement.** Turnout, quorum and pass rates computed over every proposal a space has ever carried are not comparable between DAOs unless the airdrop and phishing entries are excluded and the exclusion is stated alongside the figure. See [proposal spam and the governance denominator](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/proposal-spam-and-governance-metrics).
- **An archive proves publication, not liveness.** A Wayback capture[[4]](#ref-4) is good evidence of what a page said on a date and poor evidence of what it says now. Archived pages that were themselves client-side apps often serve stale numbers, and a capture of a 404 is indexed but not citable.
- **A live referent is not the same as the live subject.** The check above assumes documentation rots while the contract stands still. The harder case is the reverse: the contract a claim was settled against is still deployed, still readable, and still returns exactly what the page says – and the application no longer calls it. An upgradeable DAO's live implementation address lives in a proxy's storage slot rather than in any document,[[5]](#ref-5) and a full redeployment publishes a fresh registry without touching the old one, so a check pinned to a previously-correct address answers “unchanged” forever while the subject moves out from under it. Resolve the address the live application actually calls – from its own served front end, or from the proxy slot – and read the claim off that.

## An internal link is a claim

A link's visible text promises what the reader will find at the other end, so a link can resolve and still be wrong. This wiki treats the label as a citation of its own target: if none of the words in the link text appear on the page it points to, the link is repointed or relabelled rather than left standing because it returns 200. A link checker cannot see this class, because every one of these links is valid.

A maintenance pass in August 2026 found nineteen anchors reading _exit_ across eighteen articles, all pointing at [Execution](/wiki/governance/execution), a page about how a passed proposal is released, finalised and settled and which does not use the word once. The subject those links promised is documented on [Leaving a caper](/wiki/foundations/leaving-a-caper). Every one of the nineteen resolved.

## Citations needed

When a claim lacks a source, mark it with a [citation needed] tag rather than deleting it, and add a _Needs citations_ notice banner. Removing an unsourced claim outright is a last resort: the tag preserves the lead for whoever can source it, and the banner tells a reader how much of the page to trust.

Give the banner a sentence of its own rather than accepting its default wording. The default text lives in the renderer, not in the article, and every search tier this wiki runs matches on text stored in the row, so a banner left on its default is legible to a reader and invisible to a query. A notice nobody can retrieve is not a notice.

## What the two markers have actually produced

The rule above is checkable, so this section checks it, in the way [notability](/wiki/policy/notability) and [neutral point of view](/wiki/policy/neutral-point-of-view) check theirs: by measuring the corpus rather than restating the rule. A measurement over this wiki's own articles is a statement about this wiki, which is the narrow ground [no original research](/wiki/policy/no-original-research) allows, so the method is stated with the number. Read from the database on 26 August 2026, across all 261 public articles.

**Both markers are now in use, and the census above was falsified four days after it was taken – by this wiki's own maintenance pass.** Re-read from the database on 9 September 2026, across 263 public articles – a population corrected this pass, and the same size as the 7 September reading’s only because the corpus gained a page as the census lost one: three carry a notice banner. [The Exit Right](/blog/the-exit-right), [The Binding Vote](/blog/the-binding-vote) and [The Personal Caper](/blog/the-personal-caper) were each given a _May be outdated_ notice on 30 August 2026, when a governance change left three essays arguing from a mechanism that had been superseded twice; each notice carries a paragraph of its own text, which is what the instruction above asks for. All three of those paragraphs have since been rewritten – twice, most recently on 7 September 2026, when the platform was redeployed and each note had to be re-settled against the component the registry resolves to now. The placement date is stable and the text under it is not, which is the ordinary case rather than the exception: a notice is a claim about a moving subject, and it decays on the same schedule the article does. The corpus holds three [citation needed] tags, and all three are on this page: the example above, and two more added by later edits to this very section. So the figure a link checker reports for this page is three, while the number of open citation requests on this wiki is still zero – a distinction worth stating, because four consecutive audits recorded the first and read it as the second. The population above carried a defect of the same family for longer: every reading of it, here and on [neutral point of view](/wiki/policy/neutral-point-of-view) and [freshness](/wiki/policy/freshness), asked for the pages belonging to no caper and called the answer public, which silently admitted the one page this wiki publishes as having no public URL. The 7 September figure should have read 262. None of the counts in this section moved, because none of the things counted lives on that page – which is exactly why the error survived four audits.

**Two of the absences that remain are compliance rather than neglect.** The _Stub_ notice has no subjects because the corpus has no stubs: the shortest article carried 532 words of text across its blocks on 26 August and carries 593 on 9 September, which is what [list, don't stub](/wiki/policy/notability) asks for. The _Conflict of interest_ notice has no subjects either, because no caper has yet published a company page. And _May be outdated_ has two producers a reader cannot tell apart: the software raises one from the last-verified clock, and an editor can place another as a stored block. [freshness](/wiki/policy/freshness) records that the clock-raised notice has still never fired – every one visible on this wiki today was placed by hand.

**The remaining absence had a cause, and it sat in the reader rather than the writer.** The paragraph above used to promise that a banner would be found by contributors and by the maintenance sweep. The sweep is a scheduled pass whose auditor walks each page's blocks, and until 26 August 2026 it walked prose, citations, infoboxes and columns and never looked at a notice block. A marker left for it would have sat unread for as long as it stayed on the page. The auditor now reports every banner and every tag next to the page carrying it, and the sweep's own log is where that report is acted on.

**The half still open is retrieval.** All three of this wiki's search tiers match against text stored in a page's blocks, and a banner accepted at its default stores no text, so the page it sits on answers no query about it. Tested against the live index expression on 26 August 2026: an article whose only marker is a default _Needs citations_ banner does not match a search for _citations_, while ordinary prose in the same article matches normally. That is why the instruction above asks for a sentence. It is also why the tag is currently the stronger of the two markers: a [citation needed] tag lives in the prose, so it is indexed like every other word on the page.

## The five core policies

Five standards govern every article on this wiki, and they are written to be read together: each one answers a question the others do not.

- **verifiability** — sets the threshold for including material at all.
- [no original research](/wiki/policy/no-original-research) — limits what an editor may conclude from it.
- [neutral point of view](/wiki/policy/neutral-point-of-view) — governs how the material is framed.
- [notability](/wiki/policy/notability) — decides whether a subject earns an article of its own.
- [freshness](/wiki/policy/freshness) — decides how long any of it stands without a re-check.

They apply to articles about Caper and to articles about every other organisation the wiki covers, on the same terms.

### References

1. Wikipedia – _Wikipedia:Verifiability_ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability
2. DAOstar – _EIP-4824: Common Interfaces for DAOs_ — https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4824
3. Snapshot – _API documentation_ (spaces, proposal validation and member sets) — https://docs.snapshot.box/tools/api
4. Internet Archive – _Wayback Machine APIs_ — https://archive.org/help/wayback_api.php
5. Ethereum – _EIP-1967: Proxy Storage Slots_ (where a proxy records its live implementation address) — https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1967