The content Nate points to isn't wrong, it's just given inappropriate weight. But Wikipedia's coverage of block cipher modes is, compared to any other encyclopedia, successful. My kids are better off with Wikipedia's block cipher coverage than Britannica's.
I suppose my friend Nate could be arguing the following: it's unfortunate that there is marginal content that survives wikilawyering while at the same time there's good content that doesn't. But he hasn't supported that argument with evidence. What's the "good" content that belongs under CTR mode that he'd have a hard time placing there? The CTR coverage in WP isn't bad because of deletionism; it's bad because there isn't enough crypto expertise in the WP editor community.
If Nate sat down and wrote a well-sourced article on CTR mode, it would survive.
It actually is wrong, in that its summary on Microsoft Research's site shows it advocates for a permutation of a counter (e.g. LFSR) as a solution to glitch attacks against CTR mode.
That's completely ineffective. The paper by Jaffe shows how to perform DPA (passive, not active attack) against various counter modes of AES, despite the permutation in use for the counter.
However, in order for me to remove the first reference and add the second one, I'd have to undertake a war of participation on Wikipedia. The outcome would not be determined by anyone I respect in cryptography, but by people who happen to be dedicated to a particular a message board.
In the spirit of scientific and philosophical inquiry, I simply fixed the WP article we're debating about. It took 4 minutes. I did it under an anonymous IP account. Let's see how much fighting I have to do to defend the fix.
Incidentally, while I strongly advise not reading the "StankDawg Debates", I'll note that they're a case of me, a deletionist, losing an argument to anti-deletionists.
None of the content in question is "wrong": we are only discussing things with "inappropriate weight". Are you saying that the game Space Empire Elite (the article that Jason Scott is angry about today) did not exist? Was there something else on the article that you believe was "wrong"? We are explicitly discussing "notability" here.
(Sadly, I can't even look at the article, for the reason I already complained about: when Wikipedia decides to delete something, it is totally removed from the website in a way such that you cannot use edit history to get it back, making arguments about it impossible post-facto. I wish I could make a real judgement for myself.)
I do now see, however, why you made your Britannica comment: you are responding only to the final sentence of Nate's comment ("Meanwhile, a generation is growing up with this as their only example of an "encyclopedia"."), which I mostly ignored as it was just rhetoric ;P. (I am sorry that I did that, as it caused me to misunderstand your's.)
Regardless, looking at the actual argument thread, Britannica is entirely irrelevant unless it can be shown that either 1) they were of higher quality due to their more limited focus, or 2) that their eventual downfall was related to them being more likely to cover a niche topic than Wikipedia ;P.
Regardless--to now respond to your new comment--at some point you need to make a choice: either that content is notable, or it is not. If it is, you have to decide who is allowed to determine whether that fact. Wikipedia, FWIW, does not appreciate content that requires "expertise" much, as they want everything verifiable by the layman.
(Again, leading to what I consider to be a ludicrous situation with respect to the various articles surrounding RSA: there is much more coverage of the recent non-attack on embedded systems with bad random number generators than there is on actual modern mathematical attacks, seemingly because the former could be verified by newspaper articles and the latter requires citing academic papers, as the last time a review paper in this field was published, a requirement for Wikipedia's "primary sources must be verified by secondary sources" requirement, was 1999.)
"...similarly, a scientific paper documenting a new experiment is a primary source on the outcome of that experiment."
"A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the source but without further, specialized knowledge."
"For example, a review article that analyzes research papers in a field is a secondary source for the research"
"All Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources. Reliable primary sources may occasionally be used with care as an adjunct to the secondary literature, but there remains potential for misuse." (emphasis copied from original)
It is simply not true that WP forbids citations to the academic crypto literature. Anyone can go read the WP policy on primary sources (WP:PSTS) and WP:V and see that what you're saying is false.
What you're doing here is cherry picking a very reasonable policy that Wikipedia has and generalizing it far past its actual application.
What you're saying is that WP frowns on journal articles because they are "primary sources".
What WP actually says is that you can't go take the results of journal articles and use them to synthesize conclusions that the author didn't actually make inside a Wikipedia article. In other words, you cannot use WP articles to ratify new science.
I feel like if there's one place on the Internet that should appreciate a policy forbidding unfounded extrapolation from journal articles, it should be HN, which routinely hosts debates that pick apart the media's broken analysis of scientific articles.
(edit:) Why do you keep ignoring the arguments about the actual topic? Please respond to my first two paragraphs. This entire thing about verifiable sources is an off-topic argument that I'm only going down as an aside because you forced the issue by ignoring the notability problem.
You do realize that I quoted Wikipedia's guidelines, right? That those links I added were not some kind of lie: they were direct references to validate my argument.
Wikipedia seriously goes so far as to state that "mainstream newspapers" are an example of "the most reliable sources", in addition to all of the stuff I already pasted from their guidelines about journal papers.
(OK, I have 2% battery, and I can't find the reference for this, so I'm going to have to temporarily cede this argument. Grrr. I had that bit on newspapers as direct quotes in an argument from a couple months ago on this same topic, though. :( It certainly explains common practice, which "you are allowed to cite primary journal articles without backing them up from secondary sources" does not, in addition to bring a contradiction of the various guidelines.)
I cited downthread chapter and verse from WP:V explicitly stating that journal articles were good sources. In the comment you're replying to, I cited the specific policies I was referring to; I didn't provide hyperlinks because you had already hyperlinked to them. Please don't pretend that I'm making a point that's more controversial than it actually is.
It is simply not true that WP disallows citations to the academic cryptologic literature. The opposite is true.
Again, you've confused the actual policy, which says that you can't take a journal article, infer from it conclusions the author didn't make, and then draw those conclusions without any other support in the body of a WP article. The policy does not say that journal articles aren't sources.
(edit on previous comment. I am on my iPhone right now) Why do you keep ignoring the arguments about the actual topic? Please respond to my first two paragraphs (of the grandparent comment). This entire thing about verifiable sources is an off-topic argument that I'm only going down as an aside because you forced the issue by ignoring the notability problem.
"""None of the content in question is "wrong": we are only discussing things with "inappropriate weight". Are you saying that the game Space Empire Elite (the article that Jason Scott is angry about today) did not exist? Was there something else on the article that you believe was "wrong"? We are explicitly discussing "notability" here.
(Sadly, I can't even look at the article, for the reason I already complained about: when Wikipedia decides to delete something, it is totally removed from the website in a way such that you cannot use edit history to get it back, making arguments about it impossible post-facto. I wish I could make a real judgement for myself.)"""
Everything after those two paragraphs was "ok, of you insist on making a confusing non sequitur about Britannica based on that one rhetorical sentence from Nate's argument, I guess I can play along and argue", but is sadly the only thing you insist on arguing about, ignoring th deletionism issue. :(
You've quietly edited your previous comments to avoid having them rebutted by my comments, so I'm done. I'm mystified by why you'd feel the need to do that, by the way.
Actually, I explicily "ceded" them, as I can't appropriately source them on an iPhone (and we are now arguing on that path entirely based on who has better quotes), and I considered them a waste of time anyway, as my first contention on that argument thread was that you were off-topic.
That means you won, congratulations: it does not mean I don't want them rebutted, as if so I wouldn't explicitly cede; the implication there would be I don't want to lose, and yet here I am, saying you must be right, as I can't back my arguments up anymore. You won: don't be angry you won.
However, you simply ignored all of the main deletionist-related arguments in your quest to defeat the one unrelated thing you felt you could argue against (the verifiability of crypto papers on Wikipedia). "I'm mystified by why you feel the need to do that, by the way."
You first ignored Nate's argument, concentrating on the rhetorical ending note; you side-stepped my calling you out on that (so you could argue more about verifiability), and then you ignored my attempt to reconnect to the mainline argument... you are pretty much just trolling, and I fell for it :(.
(added:) Wait, define "quietly edited"? I didn't remove anything from them (normally for typos and grammar). I often redraft what I say during the couple minutes after I post it, but I don't alter the argument. The only edits I made to that post were 1) to remove a sentence "please argue your point better" which wasn't even in my original submission (and when I looked at it, I decided it was needlessly insulting; it was there maybe 30 seconds; I shouldn't have said it, and I apologize), 2) to add the paragraph at the top, which I explicitly said was an "edit", as I felt it not worth a second reply; and 3) to remove a hyperlink I had originally used as the reference for the thing on newspapers in a panic at 3% battery life based on a Google hit that was wrong, replacing it with me explicitly ceding the argument when I couldn't find the right hyperlink, which only puts you at an advantage.
I suppose my friend Nate could be arguing the following: it's unfortunate that there is marginal content that survives wikilawyering while at the same time there's good content that doesn't. But he hasn't supported that argument with evidence. What's the "good" content that belongs under CTR mode that he'd have a hard time placing there? The CTR coverage in WP isn't bad because of deletionism; it's bad because there isn't enough crypto expertise in the WP editor community.
If Nate sat down and wrote a well-sourced article on CTR mode, it would survive.