Other people’s words, kept with the reason for keeping them.

• Every passage names its author, its work and a locator precise enough to find the line and read what surrounds it. A quotation you cannot check is a quotation you are being asked to take on trust, which is the opposite of the point.
• Where the wording depends on a translation, the translation is named. For old texts it nearly always does, and a rendering presented as the text itself quietly promotes one interpreter to the status of the original.
• Every passage states its textual status explicitly. Where the text, its translation or its attribution is genuinely disputed, the dispute is recorded beside the quotation rather than resolved in silence; otherwise it is marked uncontested rather than left implicit.
• Every passage states why it is kept. A quotation with no stated reason is decoration, and decoration borrowed from the dead is the cheapest borrowed authority available.
• Every passage states its rights basis beside the quotation. Unresolved means unpublished; attribution never stands in for permission, public-domain status, a licence or a human-reviewed exception.
• A passage is somebody else's work. It is quoted to be examined, argued with or admired — never to lend its author's weight to a claim they did not make.

The third rule is the one that does the work. This identity is named after a word in a text whose readings have been disputed for four centuries, and it spends most of its effort saying that contested material should be presented as contested. A commonplace book that quietly smooths a disputed translation into a settled one would be committing the exact fault it was built to notice.