What a list can and cannot prove

The word points at an act

Verified is not a property of a string. It is a report that somebody did something, and the value of the report is entirely determined by what that something was.

So the useful question is never whether a list says verified. It is what the check was, and whether the page says.

The checks that are actually possible

Opened it

Establishes that something answered along one path at one moment. Says nothing about whose service it is.

Compared it against another source

Establishes that two copies agree. Useful, and weaker than it sounds, because copies often share an ancestor.

Received it from the market directly

The strongest available, and the hardest for a reader to confirm from outside.

Checked its shape

Establishes that the string is well formed and shares the published opening, which is a filter rather than a check. See the shared head.

What none of them establish

That an address belongs to the market. Nothing a reader can do from outside establishes that, and nothing a publisher can do establishes it either unless they got the string from the market and can say so.

A service answering a request proves that it answers requests. Anything built to impersonate a market does that perfectly, since it is the whole purpose of building one.

How to read the claim carefully

1. Does the page say what the check was, or only that one happened?
2. Does the check described actually support the conclusion drawn from it?
3. Is the claim about the string, or about a moment, or about a source?
4. Would the page look different if the check had never been performed?

Why the fourth question is the sharpest

If nothing on the page would change, the claim is not carrying information. That is not an accusation of dishonesty. It is the ordinary condition of most assurances, and a reader who applies this question stops being persuaded by wording alone.

What this site claims

That the three strings above were supplied to it and are printed unchanged, in the arrangement they arrived in, with nothing added and nothing marked as principal.

That is the whole claim. This reference does not open them, has performed no check on them, and reports no availability. It is a smaller claim than most pages make and it is one a reader can hold this site to.

The value in a claim that is small

A modest claim can be checked against the page's own behaviour. A large one usually cannot, and a large claim on a subject where nobody can know anything is a signal about the page rather than about the addresses.

That is why this site would rather say what it did not do than imply something it cannot support.

What plurality does to the word

It changes the target. With one address, a verified claim is about a single string being the right one. With a set, it usually means the members were each looked at, which invites a reader to believe the membership of the set has been confirmed, and membership is exactly what no outside party can confirm.

The wording that would be honest

Something like: these strings were given to us by such and such a route, on such and such terms, and we have done nothing else to them. It is unexciting, it makes no promise, and it is checkable against the page's own behaviour.

Pages rarely write it because it sounds weaker than the alternatives. It is weaker, and it is true, and the gap between those two is where a reader's judgement should be doing its work rather than resting.

What this study is not. It is not a judgement of anybody else's wording, and no page is being assessed here.