[dataflow]

> Imagine if it was taboo to independently test the integrity of bitcoin for example.

> The sibling mentioned the linux kernel case. I admit that one felt wrong.

> I don't pretend to have reconciled why one seems right to me and the other wrong.

The "how" is what matters here, not just the "what". "Testing the integrity of Bitcoin" by breaking the hash on your own machine (and publishing the results, or not) is one thing. "Testing" it by sending transactions that might drain someone else's wallet is quite another. Similarly with Linux, hacking it on your own machine and publishing the result is one thing. Introducing a potential security hole on others' machines is another. Similarly with water: messing with your own drinking water is one thing. Messing with someone else's water is quite another.

[lll-o-lll]

> Similarly with Linux, hacking it on your own machine and publishing the result is one thing. Introducing a potential security hole on others' machines is another.

Playing devils advocate for a moment. How else do you test the robustness of the human process to prevent bad actors? Don’t you need someone to attempt to introduce a security hole to know that you are robust to this kind of attack?

[xxs]

You do it w/ a buy-in, e.g. permission from some of the maintainers - so they are aware. If you do not get permission, you do nothing. It's similar to penetration testing/

[dataflow]

Interestingly, while I 100% agree with you regarding the parent's question about security holes, I'm actually not sure how an experiment like the one on Wikipedia could be performed even with proper buy-in from all the owning entities (Wikimedia Foundation?) Is it even in principle possible to test this ethically without risking misleading the users (the public)? If not, does that mean it's better if nobody researches it at all? The best I can think of is by making edits that as harmless as possible, but their very inconsequentiality would make them inherently less likely for them to be removed. Any thoughts?

[xxs]

The usual answer is the chain of trust. However, that might be against the wikipedia principles. There is "importance scale" for articles, for anything considered C+ class important, editing becomes similar to pull request, or the page has a warning of having unverified info.

It's a hard problem having fully editable storage by anyone, while maintaining integrity.

[maxbond]

This seems really easy to test ethically.

You sift through the edit log to find edits correcting factual errors.

Then you find the edit where the error was introduced.

You can probably let an LLM do the first pass to identify likely candidates. With maybe 20 hours of work you could probably identify hundreds of factual errors. (Number is drawn from a hat.)

[dataflow]

How do you find the factual errors that weren't corrected to figure out what the correction rate was?

[maxbond]

Excellent point. That's more difficult but I think the ethical way to do it would be to recruit subject matter experts to fact check articles across a variety of disciplines. Bonus, you can then contribute corrections.

In general what I'm saying is, this is a fertile ground for natural experiments. We don't need to manufacture factual errors in Wikipedia. They occur naturally.

[dataflow]

> Playing devils advocate for a moment. How else do you test the robustness of the human process to prevent bad actors? Don’t you need someone to attempt to introduce a security hole to know that you are robust to this kind of attack?

How do you test that the White House perimeters are secure, or that the president is adequately protected by the Secret Service?