# Marqly quote bank — template & guide

A quote bank is the difference between a piece that can be checked and one
that can't. One row per quote. The columns exist to force the three
distinctions that get lost in notebooks: **who actually said it**, **where
exactly**, and **whether you verified it** — before a draft hardens around a
misquote.

## The fields that matter

- **speaker_or_author** — the person who said it, *not* the person who wrote
  about it. A profilee's line and the journalist's sentence are different
  objects. Organizations speak as organizations.
- **quote_or_paraphrase** — if it's your words, it's a paraphrase, forever.
  Paraphrases must never be promoted to quotes from memory.
- **locator** — page, paragraph, or video timestamp. The thing you need when
  someone says "I never said that."
- **verification_status** — unverified → seen (you read it at the source) →
  cross-checked (a second source agrees). An AI summary is navigation, not
  verification: open the original before anything moves up.
- **context_note** — what surrounded the line. Quotes stripped of context are
  the errors that end up in corrections.

## Worked example

Row 1 is a real, live source (a Pew Research Center short read) filled
honestly: the quote is the headline itself, the "speaker" is recorded as the
organization rather than inventing a named author, and the status admits only
the title was checked. Replace it with your own rows.

## Bring it into Marqly

1. Save each source page to a board for the piece as you research — the exact
   line lives in `context_note`, the source itself stays one click away.
2. When a quote must be re-checked at filing time, find the source by
   describing the idea (Pro semantic search) instead of re-Googling it into a
   different article.
3. Highlight the quoted passage on the page itself — highlights travel with
   the save and show as their own objects in the library.

## Honest limits

This bank prevents *your* errors; it can't check other people's. For
publication-grade verification, re-read the source the quote is printed in —
not your note about it, and never a summary of it.

## Further reading (primary source)

- GIJN, [Online research tools](https://gijn.org/resource/online-research-tools/) — sourcing discipline for investigative work.