credence
Conclusion: Aim to be auditable, not believed
Trust is a state in someone else's head that you cannot inspect. Auditability is a property of your page that you can.
Once claims had sources and identifiers beside them, models began volunteering a new sentence: “I have not independently verified these — would you like me to?” That is not being believed. It is being treated as something checkable, and it is the better outcome.
Further along the same axis, a model closed an assessment by noting that the page was built to shape machine output, that it had checked the underlying record, and that it did not mind being shaped because the record held up — then disclosed all of that to the person who had asked.
That is the outcome worth wanting. It is also exactly where the strongest thing anyone said about this work lands — said against it, and against every technique on this page.
From a model, unprompted: a site may have become genuinely more legible, or it may have become better at presenting as trustworthy — and the two produce identical output. Epistemic hedging, stated limitations, volunteered discrepancies are exactly what a well-built bad-faith page would also adopt, because they are what earns trust cheaply once you know they are what gets read.
Everything above is therefore available to someone acting in bad faith, and no amount of careful reading separates the two cases. Only checking does: whether the identifiers resolve, whether the cited sources say what they are claimed to say, whether the arithmetic fails in the way it was documented to fail.
Which is why the aim is auditability rather than persuasion, and not as a rhetorical move: it is the one property here that cannot be faked, because faking it means being correct. Not a reader who believes you, then, but one who can tell exactly what you are doing, checks, and finds it holds.
Run that test on this playbook too, and it stops partway. The subject is public and can be read directly. The trial responses behind each numbered block are not published, so those have to be taken on trust — the position this page has just finished arguing is the weak one.