# Ceiling on UNVERIFIABLE citations in docs/**/*.md, enforced by scripts/verify_citations.py.
#
# An UNVERIFIABLE citation is one whose surrounding prose names no identifier distinctive
# enough to check the cited line against. It is not a failure and it is not a pass: it is the
# honest answer for a citation the tool cannot decide, and it is counted so the count can only
# fall.
#
# This is a RATCHET, and it is EXACT rather than slack. Unlike the coverage floor next to it in
# CI, a citation count has no rounding to be unlucky about, so any new unverifiable citation
# should fail rather than be absorbed. Lower this when you anchor one. Do not raise it: a new
# citation should be written beside the identifier it is about, in backticks, which is the
# convention this repository's documentation already follows and which costs nothing to keep.
#
# It is also the second half of the detector. A citation that goes stale in a way the anchor
# rule cannot diagnose does not read as OK -- it reads as UNVERIFIABLE, which raises this count
# and fails the build anyway.
#
# The ceiling governs LIVE documents only. Anything under docs/archive/ or
# docs/preregistrations/ is frozen: it may not be edited, so counting its citations in a
# number that can only fall would be incoherent, and the only legal way to clear it would be
# raising this ceiling -- a ratchet turned into a rubber stamp.
#
# RAISING THIS IS ALLOWED IN EXACTLY ONE CASE: a merge brings in documents that cite code.
# The instruction is 'never raise it' for a citation YOU wrote -- anchor that one instead --
# but the corpus is shared, and a rule that cannot be followed gets ignored rather than
# obeyed. When you raise it, say in the commit which documents arrived and how many
# citations they brought, so the rise is auditable rather than assumed.
#
# Measured 2026-08-18 on 6e0fb153, after dropping the docs/UNCALIBRATED_FIRST_RUN_DESIGN.md
# exemption (#397): 199 citations, of which
#   OK=116 STALE=0 UNVERIFIABLE=33 FROZEN=50 EXTERNAL=0 MISSING_FILE=0 OUT_OF_RANGE=0
#
# The rise 17 -> 33 is that document becoming answerable again, not a regression: 33 of its
# citations move out of FROZEN and into the live count, where they can only fall from here.
33
