reach
Your sources may not be reachable
Check that a citation can be fetched before you rely on it. The sources you reach for first are not always the ones that come back.
Sourcing a single factual claim, in one sitting:
- the auction house
- disallowed to the crawler
- the project's own site
- 403, behind a bot check
- six trade publications
- 403
- the community index
- 200, and ten characters of text
- a marketplace API
- 402, payment required
- a mid-tier aggregator
- 200, plain HTML, facts in the body
The only citable source was the least authoritative one — which says something about how that corner of the web is fenced, and nothing at all about whether the claim was true.
One sitting is not a pattern, and this is not a rule that authority and accessibility trade off. But the mechanism is not mysterious: the publishers with the most to protect are the ones who buy bot protection, meter their archives and restrict crawlers, and an aggregator repeating them has no such incentive. Expect to hit it sometimes, and check rather than assume — the citation that fails is the one you were most confident about.