what is a sib.?
 

What I really want to know is if a orchid is a something x sib. what is the difference from the original?

'x sib' would be crossing with a flaskmate or the like (both parents of your plant are siblings). 'x self' would be crossed with another flower from the same plant. Mating siblings allows a little more variability in progeny relative to selfing, but still restricts the variability more than crossing two 'unrelated' members of a species.

ok thanks for the info. does it affect the plant or flower at all in size ?can a sib. be judged the same?

Not really. Whoever made the cross presumably had a reason - trying to select for a certain flower characteristics, growth habit, etc. Or they just had two sibling plants, and decided to make more because they could. In any seed-grown orchid, there will be variation, but between siblings, it should be fairly reduced, since both the parents are closely related. But with biology, there's always a chance some progeny might be different-better, and some be different-worse. Which is why people get so into breeding, trying to control the outcomes. But these are the people who make those 'x sib' plants we buy, so we just have to put some faith that they did a decent job and the plants will turn out well. Which is 99% of the time, unless you're getting into some really avant-garde stuff.

As to judging, I'm not into the whole judging circuit so someone else will have to answer that.

thanks dansyr, that does clear things up. I'm not into the judging thing either,but was interested in knowing

Generally, people consider that siblings are sharing both parents. But technically, there are several types of sib-mating. Full-sib mating is the mating between two individuals who share both mom and dad. However there is half-sib mating, too. Dad A and Mom B produced a kid C. Dad A and mom D produced a kid E. Then kid C x kid E is called a paternal half-sib mating, since C and E shares dad. Similarly if two kids share the mom, it is maternal half-sib mating. Some orchid breeders don't seem to know these basic terminologies of breeding, and you occasionally see them use sib-mating incorrectly (e.g. they call crossing conspecific as sib mating, even though they are not siblings and they should be called outcrossing).