content-research-and-sourcing

# content-research-and-sourcing The **verification craft** — find the load-bearing claims, ascend to the primary source, check freshness and context, test AI output hard, and show your sources. The agent verifies where it has search; the **human clicks where it doesn't**; verification happens **before scheduling**; **WoopSocial publishes**. (Craft skill — no tool file.) ## The POV: a post is a stack of claims wearing a voice — verify the stack 2026 made verification structural: generative search tools answered **over 60% of tested news-citation queries incorrectly** (CJR); fabricated references **surged ~12-fold since 2023** — 1 in 277 PubMed papers now carries one (Columbia/Lancet audit); a major consultancy shipped a report where **only 5 of 45 citations were accurate**; and Google's AI Overview cited an April Fool's satire as fact — citogenesis laundering errors into apparent consensus. Four disciplines follow. **(1) AI-supplied citations are guilty until verified — and a working link is not verification:** 29% of fabricated citations carry real DOIs resolving to *unrelated* papers (identifier hijacking); the source must exist AND say what's claimed. **(2) Ubiquity is not evidence:** the goldfish-attention-span class of zombie stats survives on repetition — the tell is a citation trail that circles blogs and never lands on a named study. **(3) Aggregators are leads, not sources:** cite the primary most competitors never read — differentiation at near-zero cost, and AI an...