(Scroll to the bottom for the TL;DR)
On the web, there are plenty of people trying to make a few bucks by cutting-and-pasting someone else’s info, making a few edits, and then calling it their own. Some folks have turned this into quite an operation for fields that are info-rich, orchids being a great example. You could do the same with, say, information about dogs. You don’t need to know anything about dogs, except that there are plenty of people searching for info on dogs out there, and hence, plenty of internet traffic on the topic. So you make a list of all dog breeds, a list of common dog ailments, a list of dog training info, etc. Next, make a free website on blogspot or similar, and make pages for each of the topics on your lists. Then start scouring the web for info that you can literally cut-and-paste onto your website. Finally, set up Google Ads on your website, and wait for the money train to start rolling in!
The only work you’re doing is giving your wrist a good work out with all that cutting-and-pasting, but voila, you’re now an Internet “Authority” on dogs. No need to actually have owned a dog, much less become knowledgeable about Dalmatians and their inherited diseases, or training a dog to balance a book on his head and walk across the room, or whether meat-only diets are really good for your dog. Just cut-and-paste other people’s hard-won knowledge WITH NO ATTRIBUTION, re-arrange a few words here and there, and wait for the search engines to rank your page high.
An astute reader can usually spot this kind hack work right away. Cut-and-paste artists like this trying to put out stuff on orchids usually sound very formulaic, as a lot of their stuff is lifted out of Wikipedia, (where most of the info is quite dry, no pun intended) or from IOSPE, the Internet Orchid Species Page, a helpful resource for orchid species devotees.
Here’s something on the species Dendrobium linawianum from a site that shows up on orchid name searches:
Dendrobium linawianum also called as Linawi’s Dendrobium, Callista linawiana, Dendrobium alboviride, Dendrobium purpureum, Ormostema purpurea, is a species of the genus Dendrobium. This species was described by Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach in 1861.
Dendrobium linawianum is found only Taiwan and Kwangsi province in southern China. It grows usually on tree trunks in broadleaf forests at elevations of 400 to 1500 meters above sea level.
Now, here’s the entry on this species from IOSPE:
Found only Taiwan and Kwangsi province in southern China usually in broadleaf forests at 400 to 1500 meters in elevation as a small to medium sized, hot to cool growing epiphyte with clustered, branching, slightly flattened, yellow brown, lustrous stems that are slightly swollen apically and have a pseudobulb-like swelling below carrying a 6 to 7, coriaceous, narrowly elliptical to oblong, 2 ranked, apcailly unequally emarginate leaves that blooms in the late winter and early spring from the upper nodes, few [2 to 3] flowered inflorescence carrying large showy flowers.
Synonyms Callista linawiana (Rchb.f.) Kuntze 1891; Dendrobium alboviride Hayata 1920; Dendrobium purpureum (Raf.) M.R.Almeida 2009; Ormostema purpurea Raf. 1838
Dendrobium linawianum Rchb.f. 1861 SECTION Dendrobium
Take a look at the bolded text in the two excerpts above. As many teachers in the audience can relate, grammatical errors or typos in a text suspected of being, ahem, plagiarized, that perfectly match grammatical errors or typos in an original document is practically smoking gun proof of copying.
I’ve got nothing against folks trying to earn money on the web, but I am troubled by what is, essentially, plagiarism, but I’m really disturbed by the lack of attribution to IOSPE.
So you can see why this kind of stuff, without attribution, is really bad for spreading good, quality information on orchids (or anything else). Someone, an original writer, posts something incorrect about growing orchids someplace. The posting gets linked by someone else, and then gets quoted by someone else, and then a cut-and-paste operator grabs it, and before you know it, this wrong info has spread all over the web, and people start believing it. And that’s another reason why there’s so much bad info about orchids on the web.
One of our tasks here at Orchid Insanity is to give orchid growers real info about orchids. Our hope is that you, as an orchid grower, will continue to spread the good word about growing these fascinating plants, and push back against the bad information and mis-information out there. It’s a big job.
TL;DR: Incorrect info about an orchid topic on the web gets propagated by people who don’t know (or don’t care) about the veracity of the info. More and more people read this bad info, and believe it. We’re offering good info here to push back against the bad, and hope you’ll absorb the good stuff and pass it along.