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Why every answer should show its source
An answer you cannot check is a rumour with good grammar. Here is how citations changed the way our early teams trusted Lanthorn.
By Mara Lindqvist, Research
When we started testing Lanthorn with ten teams, the first question was never about speed. It was always the same: “Where did that come from?” People did not want a clever paragraph. They wanted to know whether they could repeat it in a meeting.
A citation is a promise
Every answer in Lanthorn ends with the exact passages it used. Not a list of files, but the paragraph, the cell or the message. If a claim has no source, Lanthorn says so instead of filling the gap.
What changed when we shipped it
Teams stopped double checking answers in a second tab. They started forwarding them. In our pilot, shared answers went up four times in the month after citations became clickable.
What we still get wrong
Sources can be out of date, and a correct quote from an old page is still the wrong answer. We now show when each source was last edited, and we are working on flagging pages that contradict each other.