Open participation does not establish independent participation: pseudonymous accounts, correlated models, colluding reviewers, or coordinated contributors can create false redundancy and captured evaluation.

Counting participants, accounts, reviewers, or model labels does not measure independent evidence or judgment. One actor can operate multiple identities; several actors can coordinate; reviewers can share incentives or information; and nominally different models can inherit common data, architectures, prompts, or failure modes. The result can look like corroboration, plural review, or resistance to capture while adding little independent signal or allowing one interest to dominate evaluation. These mechanisms are distinct and should not be collapsed into one score: identity independence, incentive independence, informational independence, and error independence require different tests. The claim does not justify closing participation or distrusting pseudonymity by default. For LivingIP it requires provenance, conflict disclosure, behavioral and error-correlation measurement, anti-collusion escalation, and review rules that never equate account or vendor count with epistemic redundancy.