Quality Gate. An explicit review criterion that must be satisfied, deferred as a known gap, or escalated to a human-only decision before work is treated as ready for its intended surface. A quality gate is not a vague preference; it names the evidence, reviewer responsibility, and acceptance boundary for a technical, editorial, historical, consistency, architecture, or publishing claim.
An eval gate is the runtime-intelligence version of this rule: model, corpus, or classifier promotion is blocked until the required evaluation evidence passes.