# Separate Alleged Harm From Allegations You Cannot Verify ## Claim When a source makes a serious, plausible allegation resting entirely on unnamed sources, track the underlying pattern as worth watching and hold the specific allegation as unverified — rather than dismissing the pattern because one claim in the piece is thinly sourced. <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ## Scope & conditions - Both errors are live: repeating an unverified specific, and discarding a real pattern because its illustration was weak. - The split is per-claim, not per-source; one thinly sourced allegation does not contaminate the piece's documented material. - Recording it as "pattern: tracking; specific: unverified" keeps it usable later without committing to it now. - Applies across this batch's litigation and leadership coverage as much as to venture reporting. ## Evidence From the Cancer Capital piece, where a serious allegation rests on unnamed sourcing alongside documented material. ## Links - [[Ask Which Competitors an Investor Already Holds Information Rights In]] — the actionable claim from the same piece, which does not depend on the contested allegation - [[Separate What an Outlet Saw From What It Attributes Secondhand]] — the same per-claim discipline applied to news sourcing - [[A Single Internal Channel Is Still a Single Source]] — the adjacent sourcing question about what a narrow evidentiary base establishes - [[3. Resources/MOCs/Evidence & Claims Literacy MOC]] — the sourcing-discipline thread on handling mixed-quality sources.