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/
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?
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.
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.)
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.
I mean, you're asking for a retrospective study, as opposed to a randomized controlled trial. It's useful and a great idea, but it's not like it's an equivalent way of getting equal quality data.
But is the goal to conduct a randomized controlled trial, or to measure the correction rate within the bounds of ethics? You go to war with the army you have.