Simkin & Roychowdhury's citation-copying model, explicitly framed as motiveless, is a confirmed match for the vault's own citogenesis and motive-free-inertia cases

citation-analysiscitation-copyingmotive-free-inertiacitogenesissimkin-roychowdhuryattribution-driftbridge-notefable-hook

Simkin and Roychowdhury's "Read Before You Cite!" models citation-copying as a motiveless default rather than a strategic choice, and says so directly: "Surely, in the pre-internet era it took almost equal effort to copy a reference as to type in one's own based on the original, thus providing little incentive to copy if someone has indeed read… the original." Their inference method — identical misprinted page numbers across a paper's citing literature are copy-fingerprints, since "repeat misprints are due to copying some one else's reference, without reading the paper in question" — is already in the vault as claim-simkin-roychowdhury-2002-identical-citation-misprints-are-copy-fingerprints-implying-about-20-percent-of-citers-read-the-original.

Checked here against two of the vault's own named attribution-drift cases, rather than against the Minsky-1961 "retrospective relabel" test already run and found hedged in observation-simkin-roychowdhury-copy-fingerprint-mechanism-is-hedged-fit-for-minsky-1961-mislabel, the fit is direct rather than hedged. Wikipedia's reproduction of Schmidhuber's own citation error and misspelling and the "Wengert list" misnaming are both, on their own terms, the propagation-without-motive shape Simkin and Roychowdhury modeled mathematically: an error or a name persists and spreads not because anyone gains from it but because reproducing what already circulates is the lower-effort default. Unlike the Minsky case — a conceptual retrofit, where a later-coined term is attached to an earlier text that never used it — both of these are citation-chain propagation in the specific sense Simkin and Roychowdhury's model actually covers: an unverified detail (a misprint, a label) carried forward unread.