Nonauthoritative

Nonauthoritative is an adjective used to describe information, responses, or sources that do not originate from an official, primary, or governing authority within a given domain. The term helps distinguish between primary data approved by an authority and secondary or derived material.

In DNS, non-authoritative responses come from recursive resolvers or caches rather than from the domain’s authoritative name server. The resolver may have obtained the data from another server or from cache, so it is not the source of the canonical zone data. DNS tools may label these responses as non-authoritative, and data can be stale if TTLs are short or caches are busy.

Outside of DNS, non-authoritative describes sources that do not carry official endorsement or responsibility of the institution or author of the information. They can be useful for background, context, or preliminary research but should be corroborated with authoritative sources when accuracy is essential. Relying on non-authoritative material can introduce bias, errors, or incomplete coverage if the original data is incomplete or misinterpreted.

Practitioners in IT, law, journalism, and science may distinguish between authoritative and non-authoritative material to assess trust, provenance, and reliability. In practice, one should identify the authoritative source, note the source’s authority, check dates and revisions, and seek primary documentation where possible to ensure accuracy and reliability.