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Comment by johnea | Hacker News Reader

Much of the www is composed of copying.

I recently corrected an error in this wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Shionomisaki

Which stated: "Geologically, the cape is a flat uplifted seafood plateau"

My comment for the change: I'm not an oceanographer, but I'm pretty sure it's not a "seafood plateau". Changed to "seabed plateau"

Afterward, out of curiosity, I did a search for "seafood plateau".

I was shocked at the number of sites that exactly copied that error along with the rest of the page. Most of these sites were clones of wikipedia with the inclusion of ads.

It didn't seem that these sites were LLM generated (they were exact copies), but this seems to be the case for many scientific paper submissions now.

Where it all goes from here is extremely unclear, but it does seem a disruption to many fields which are dependent on written material is in progress...

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I would have thought it was a typo of 'seafloor' rather than 'seabed'.

I agree, just leaving the 'l' out could easily cause an auto spell check to change it to "seafood".

A friend did an edit (though you could call it vandalism) of a Wikipedia 20 years back. He linked from several pages to a non-existing apportionment method, and created an article with a fairer version of d'Hondt for elections, quite ingenious and probably more fair than the popular alternatives in most cases. He named it after himself (he has an unusual last name and capitalised on that).

It didn't take long for the page to be dropped for being original research, and he didn't put it anywhere else.

To this day, you can still find pages and people referencing the method.

Edit: a quick check and Grok and ChatGPT have scraped it, Gemini hallucinates something unrelated.

Is it Scheper’s or Ebert’s method?

https://www.bundeswahlleiterin.de/en/service/glossar/s/saint...

https://electowiki.org/wiki/Ebert%27s_method

Not really, it wasn't the English Wikipedia and most references are in the original language. After my edit above, 2/3 LLMs know about it if you ask in the original language, which is pretty damning and gives an idea of the amount of mindless scraping they do.

"Seafood plateau?? A bad translation of "plateau de mer", which is just a seafood platter?

"Plateau de mer" is not seafood platter. Seafood platter is "plateau de fruits de mer".

"Plateau de mer" could be "seabed plateau" but I am not an oceanographer so I fo not know what words they use (but strictly from the perspective of French language it is plausible)

It would be “plateau marin”, not “plateau de mer”. “Plateau de mer” does sound like a seafood restaurant special.

"Plateau de fruits de mer" is proper, but shortened in cooking practice.

Ah, I learned something then. I found a few references in Google indeed.

French here, asked the frenchies around me. Nobody thinks "plateau de mer" is an obvious shorthand for "plateau de fruit de mer". We have never heard that one. And we sure eat seafood platters on the regular.

Of course not. It's not correct.

Instagram hype for a San Francisco hipster restaurant, though...[1]

[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/C02IZeEyMPE/

Of course much of the web is composed of copying, and of course copies of Wikipedia are copied--that's hardly relevant. But science journals are another matter. From the article: "shouldn't the peer reviewers and proofreaders at a top journal catch this error?"

> "shouldn't the peer reviewers and proofreaders at a top journal catch this error?"

You're absolutely right.

I guess I was trying to speak to a broader issue, of why do we see so much blatant copying.

I don't agree with the "Of course...", I don't think this is inevitable at all, in the scope of every way the www could be.

That is eluded to in "...with the inclusion of ads". All of this fraud is motivated by monetization of every aspect of every activity.

Within the bounds of motivating actual progress, monetization is a beneficial process. Once it becomes the motive, with everything else as a means to that end, this is what leads to the "Of course" everything is corrupt.

Effect replaces cause, and everything else goes down the toilet along with it... Including the review of "scientific" papers.

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