STORM on STORM: A Meta-Evaluation of Perspective-Guided Knowledge Curation Through Self-Application

We apply the STORM methodology (Shao et al., 2024) to itself as a subject of inquiry, treating the method's self-application as a stress test. We document eight observations, ranging from the collapse of perspective diversity under nominal role assignment to the structural incompatibility of Wikipedia as a target format for grounded knowledge curation. The central concept that emerges is verification debt: the gap between the cost a system appears to impose and the cost it actually imposes, once the labor of auditing its output is included in the accounting. We propose Verification Debt per thousand words (VD/kw) as a required metric for honest comparison of long-form generation systems.