Authority Network America: Standards Reference
The standards reference defines the editorial and structural rules that govern how content is produced, classified, and published across the Authority Network America framework. Understanding these standards is essential for anyone evaluating the consistency, accuracy, or sourcing practices applied to network properties. The scope covers writing rules, source requirements, and structural quality controls enforced at the page level.
Key idea
The single controlling principle across the Authority Network America framework is verifiable specificity: every quantified claim must trace to a named public source, and every structural element must meet lint-enforced formatting rules before publication. This is not a style preference — it is a deployment gate. Pages that fail hard rules, such as unattributed statistics or prohibited vague quantifiers like "many" or "several," are blocked from the publishing pipeline entirely.
This constraint exists because reference-grade content fails the moment a reader cannot verify a core claim. A page that states costs "increased significantly" without a source is indistinguishable from marketing copy. The standards enforce a hard separation between factual reference content and promotional narrative by requiring that every specific figure — a penalty ceiling, a breach cost, a state count — carry inline attribution at the point of use, not buried in a footnote block.
The how-it-works documentation expands on how these rules are applied in practice across the production workflow.
Common terms
Inline source attribution — The requirement that dollar figures, percentages, statute citations, and named breach costs appear with a hyperlink or parenthetical citation at the exact sentence where the claim is made. This differs from a bibliography, which a reader must cross-reference separately.
Hard failure — A rule violation that blocks page deployment regardless of content quality elsewhere. First-person pronouns, fabricated statistics, and exposed internal classification codes are all classified as hard failures under the standards reference.
Prohibited vague quantifier — A category of imprecise language ("numerous," "various," "a number of") that is structurally banned and must be replaced with a specific count, a named subset, or a reframed sentence. The prohibition applies even when the underlying claim is directionally accurate, because directional accuracy without precision does not meet reference-grade standards.
These three terms represent the operational vocabulary a reader needs to interpret why content produced under the Authority Network America framework reads differently from general editorial content: the rules are mechanical, not discretionary, and they are applied uniformly regardless of topic vertical.