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These are probably the same smug people who tell you they “write” gazillions of papers/year. More haste, less speed.

Absolutely. If you aren't capable of doing the reading, should you really be doing the writing?

In High Energy physics experiments there are sometimes hundreds of authors (basically the entire collaboration). Is the person who worked on the calorimeter calibration responsible for the algorithms for higher order K+ production channels in Pythia?

There's a huge gap between deep expertise + abject ignorance, though For any given topic, we all start at different points on that spectrum + any good research team will choose collaborators accordingly who we trust to do their best work

Machine translation isn’t perfect but it will give you enough of a head start that your co-writer who speaks that language and understands the paper can explain to you why it matters and if they can’t why are either of you citing it?

While I agree, the bar being set here is much lower than that. At least one of the authors needs to confirm that any citations they have added to the manuscript actually exist. I don't think that's too much to ask.

An impossible standard

Did these idiots get tarred and feathered metaphorically speaking? I hope so.