Citation with invalid temporality
- Id
- invalid-citation-temporality
- Status
- Active
- Severity
- high
- Detection
- judge
- Evidence grade
- community-observed
- Languages
- en
- Added
- 2026-08-15
- Updated
- 2026-08-15
Currently signals low-effort writing.
What it is
A cited source is dated before the event it is cited for. The 2019 article does not report the 2024 recall. Nobody wrote it about that.
Why it reads as machine-made
This is the sharpest mechanical check in the semantic set, because it needs no judgment about quality and no domain knowledge. Two dates and a subtraction settle it. Wikipedia lists the pattern under criterion G15, alongside the other citation-form failures, where it sits as the variant that a reviewer can run without leaving the page.
Specimens
The September 2025 recall was widely covered at the time, including in the industry survey cited below, which sets out the same failure mode in detail. [Nordic Component Review, March 2021]
The recall notice is dated 12 September 2025 and we are linking the notice itself. A 2021 industry survey described a similar failure mode four years earlier, which is worth reading and is not coverage of this recall.
The publication and dates in the first version are invented for this specimen. The repair keeps the older source and stops it standing in for reporting it could not contain.
How it is detected
- Rubric
- Task: compare each citation's date with the date of what it is cited for. Step 1. For every citation, record the source date. Use the publication date on the source itself, not the date given in the citing text. Step 2. Record the date of the event, finding or state of affairs the citation supports. If the citing text gives no date, look for one in the surrounding paragraph. Step 3. Subtract. Mark IMPOSSIBLE when the source predates the event. Escape hatches, which return PASS: articles updated after publication that keep the original date, so check for a revision history before concluding; wire copy republished under a new timestamp; scheduled or pre-announced events, where reporting legitimately precedes them; forecasts, projections and previews; recurring events where the citation covers an earlier occurrence and the text says so; undated pages, which return UNKNOWN. Decision. FLAG on one IMPOSSIBLE pairing where no escape applies. One is enough, because the citation cannot be doing the work claimed for it. Output: the citation, both dates, the gap in days, and FLAG / PASS / UNKNOWN.
Who writes this way legitimately
Dates on the web are unreliable in both directions. Publishers backdate updated articles to the original publication, wire services restamp syndicated copy, and content management systems display the date of the last template change rather than the last edit. A source can also legitimately predate an event when it is reporting a plan, a filing, a scheduled launch or a court date. Historians and archivists work with undated material constantly and would fail a naive version of this check every day. The reviewer needs the archive record or the revision history before calling anything impossible, and where neither is reachable the honest verdict is unknown.
Model attribution
Undocumented per vendor. It follows from a citation being assembled rather than looked up, and the same failure appears in human work produced from a reference list nobody opened.
Platform notes
- wikipedia
- G15 groups this with the other citation-form failures. Editors treat it as one of the fastest checks available during cleanup triage.
Status history
| Date | Status | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-15 | Active | One community source names it, and the check itself is arithmetic rather than interpretive, so the entry ships on a single citation with that stated. Nothing else in this dataset can be verified as cheaply. |
Sources
- 01Wikipedia: Criteria for speedy deletion, G15communityaccessed 2026-08-14
CC BY 4.0 / The AI Tells Index, feedsquad.com/ai-tells