What the reference describes.
Goodhart's law is an adage that has been stated as, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who is credited with expressing the core idea of the adage in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom: Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
What the process still cannot guarantee.
Optimizing publication counts or benchmark scores can corrupt the underlying purpose of science.
That is a design criticism of how this research operation may be used, not a claim that the encyclopedia endorses the limitation. In this domain, the general redesign question is: journals, universities and incentives become service providers around evidence, not gatekeepers of truth.
Replace the mechanism.
Maintain plural quality signals, adversarial audits and periodically replaced evaluation sets.
Implementation requires a typed scientific claim, explicit operational definitions, controlled access to evidence, an immutable record of relevant transformations, and independent checking appropriate to the kind of assertion. An AI-generated interpretation without those checks would reproduce the underlying failure at greater speed.
What would demonstrate improvement?
Compare systems that optimize a single score with systems assessed on unseen evidence quality.
Compare with a defined baseline under matched resources, keep evaluation cases independent of the system under test, and measure both false alarms and undetected errors. Publish any negative or inconclusive result as part of the same investigation record.
Continue across concepts.
Each related title has its own revision-specific Wikipedia source and a separate critical dossier. Crosslinks are exploratory; they do not imply the encyclopedia articles support the proposed replacement.
No single authority.
The reference article establishes the historical and methodological subject under examination. The proposed criticism and replacement must earn their own support through reproducible tests and independent validation. Record disagreements instead of silently overwriting them.
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