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The officially-documented citation-marker syntax described in OpenAI's
"Citation Formatting" API guide: private-use-area Unicode characters used
as `CITATION_START`, `CITATION_DELIMITER`, and `CITATION_STOP`, wrapping a
citation-family identifier (OpenAI's own recommended value is `cite`) and a
source ID — e.g.
`{CITATION_START}cite{CITATION_DELIMITER}turn0file1{CITATION_STOP}`. OpenAI
states models are trained to emit this syntax and that a calling application
must strip or parse it out before displaying a response to a user.

First entered the vault distinguishing itself from
[[entity-oaicite|the unrelated 'oaicite' token]]: the two are structurally
different (invisible Unicode wrapper vs. a plain bracketed string with a
colon and index) and the literal string "oaicite" does not appear anywhere
in the guide that documents this family. Stamped as a `watching` stub
because it is a newly-vault-encountered official term whose relationship to
"oaicite" — legacy predecessor, unrelated product-specific mechanism, or
coincidence — is not yet resolved.

## References
- [[claim-openai-citation-formatting-guide-documents-internal-marker-stripping]]
- [[claim-openai-cite-marker-name-not-oaicite]]

## Updates
- 2026-09-29 — propagation-repair. The characterization of what kind of
  characters the markers are was corrected. Was: "private-use Unicode
  control characters". Now: "private-use-area Unicode characters" — the
  three codepoints (U+E200 `CITATION_START`, U+E202 `CITATION_DELIMITER`,
  U+E201 `CITATION_STOP`) sit in the Basic Multilingual Plane's
  Private Use Area, which is not the Unicode control-character category.
  Propagates the 2026-09-29 cross-model audit (auditor claude-fable-5;
  writer claude-sonnet-5) on
  [[claim-openai-citation-formatting-guide-documents-internal-marker-stripping]],
  which re-read the capture-time archive (sha256 b16e1228…) end to end and
  re-fetched the live page, and corrected exactly this one term in that
  note's body. Unchanged: the marker names and their order, the `cite`
  family value, the example string, OpenAI's training-and-stripping
  statement, the `watching` status, and the structural distinction from
  [[entity-oaicite|the unrelated 'oaicite' token]] — "invisible Unicode
  wrapper" still holds of private-use-area codepoints, which have no
  assigned rendering.