Plagiarized in a plagiarism atonement essay
plagiarismtoday.com
plagiarismtoday.com
Right now is the end of the school year for many schools in the USA. That makes it a time for final exams for many students. This week a student I know prepared for the Literature final by reading through the SparkNotes for the book they had read earlier. Then the student took some SparkNotes practice tests on the book. Then the student showed up to take the actual final exam.
The final exam was verbatim the SparksNotes practice test--uncredited.
A middle school classmate once turned in an article from Encarta as their essay for Social Studies. They didn’t copy paste the text… they literally printed the article, crossed out “Microsoft Encarta” with a pencil and then wrote their name at the top.
I was impressed with how little effort they put in. Teacher gave them an F of course.
I haven't thought about that in about 15 years and just started laughing to myself about the time my English teacher was struggling to turn the volume off during study hall as Rick Astley sang almost the entire song at full volume.
I just don't understand today how anyone can think they could get away with plagiarism with computers and the internet etc.
Students are going to generate writing they didn't do with GPT-3
And teachers are going to use the discriminator part of a GAN to figure out if students did their own writing
But here is sort of the funny thing, as I have gotten older, I have grown to appreciate things like poetry a lot more and have even tried my hand at it a few times for fun.
I guess it just proves the old adage "retirement is wasted on the old and school is wasted on the young". Not sure who said that. I probably just committed plagiarism for not including an attribution. Sorry to whomever said it, wait, let me copy some Tracy Chapman Lyrics for the apology :)
Plagiarism is copying someone else's work; using AI (or an essay farm manned by humans) is outsourcing the creation of a new thing.
ADDED: There is a degree of I know cheating when I see it. But, absent specific instructions to the contrary, spell checkers and grammar checkers/recommenders seem to fall pretty clearly into the assistive tools category whereas GPT-3 does not.
Legalities do matter here. The definition is “taking someone else’s work.” AI (currently) has no rights and no ownership. It is an “it” and not a “someone.” You are using a tool, an advanced tool that should be dealt with on a case by case basis. IOW, “don’t bring a graphing calculator.”
But it appears we are on the same page. If it’s directly against the rules, that’s different (like bringing an advanced calculator to an elementary math exam). But it def isn’t plagiarism.
GPT-3 is constructing entire narratives from prompts. It operates at the level of multiple sentences and paragraphs, to the scope of an entire essay itself. Based on a provided prompt, it generates an essay.
By your same logic, an instructor assigning a class essay would be considered the author of those essays as that instructor had generated the prompt.
Moreover, as a matter of pedagogy, where a course either assigns group work (such that multiple students are contributing to an essay), or requires drafts and reviews with an instructor, TA, or other students as part of the overall essay-writing assignment, those become acknowledge parts of the process. In the case of the draft / review / revise cycle, it would seem that that is one way of putting a check on AI-generated essays, at least for now, as though generators can follow prompts, they're rather more limited in taking criticism well, and adapting to it.
Hol up, didn't you just describe academic research?! Sounds like we're on the right path here.
There was the famous example where Copilot regenerated some John Carmack code verbatim with cussing comments, presumably because that code had been copied many times already.
Somewhere I read about GPT-3 committing clear plagiarism in English text, too, i.e. drawing way too much from one source and reproducing it.
If it's somebody else's, give them credit.
If it's algorithm or automated output, say so.
Teachers sometimes become suspicious because the students’ submitted texts contain many fewer grammatical errors and nonidiomatic expressions than the students’ speech or in-class writing. But it is hard to prove plagiarism if the teachers cannot do web searches in the students’ first language.
I did hear once, though, of a cut-and-paste MT translation being caught by a teacher because it included some large unique numbers, which did appear in a Google search.
A related issue that writing teachers are struggling to come to terms with is whether second-language writers are cheating when they use MT to translate texts that they originally wrote in their first language. Some teachers, especially in language-focused classes, believe that the use of MT hurts the students’ language acquisition and thus defeats one purpose of the writing assignments; they also think it is unfair to other students who struggle to write in the second language without the help of MT. Other teachers believe that writers should be allowed to use whatever tools are available to them as long as their content is original.
After all, it's arguably only one step away from Grammarly correcting errors and otherwise fine-tuning your writing. I don't personally use it but I know people who swear by it. And presumably almost no one would consider that cheating.
Looking at the results of the final exam it should have been at most 20%.
To this day I wonder what kind of upbringing they had that they felt the need to cut corners like that at such an early age.
I took a class on logistics as part of my major, and our course professor was rotating an exam he had given three years prior, with weirdly dated examples and all.
In academia it's rife. I was alerted by students to a course at a prominent Russell Group London university where the entire course notes were copied verbatim from my website. The only edit was to deliberately remove my name from every page and slide.
The only thing more disgraceful than plagiarism is the arms-race and racket around "preventing" it with tools like the dubious "Turnitin" - dubious in its effectiveness, treatment of students work, privacy implications and the fact that students are compelled to use it, in most cases without prior formal agreement [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier
[2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/anti-turnitin-scho...
> In academia it's rife. I was alerted by students to a course at a prominent Russell Group London university where the entire course notes were copied verbatim from my website. The only edit was to deliberately remove my name from every page and slide.
Did you report it to the university? You should, the academics who do this, should be face consequences and in my experiences plagiarism is one of the few wrongdoings that gets relatively swift action, I suspect because it usually is very clearly unethical conduct.
Of course. But I have to tell you, they skilfully sidestepped it by blaming an firing a TA, who I happen to know was entirely innocent. The actual culprit is still a senior professor at that university. Things are always more complex in real life, as you know. The professor was also a PhD supervisor to a friend and we had to choose which battles to fight, rocking the boat would have had consequences far beyond my own vanity and sense of injustice.
Now I write regular pieces in the Times Higher Education. Having taught at dozens of universities as an international visiting professor I've got a wide and deep view of academia. In a nutshell it's run by gangsters and has a very, very high concentration of psychopaths (much higher than 'industry' I would say because there are ways of being cocooned and cloistered in academia which isolate one from conseqences found in the world of real business)
Would you or your friend still need to fear reprisals if you're naming names now? If not, given that normal channels have failed that all sounds sufficiently bad that at least naming the university and department might be worth considering.
> there are ways of being cocooned and cloistered in academia which isolate one from conseqences found in the world of real business
Given your experience, I'd be very curious to hear what the main mechanisms your witnessed for side-stepping consequences for psychopathic behavior actually were. Since academia only involves spending other people's money without any direct test against outside reality, it stands to reason that it would be much more vulnerable to capture by colluding bad actors than business, where beyond a certain point of organizational pathology the money stops flowing in. There's of course also at least one mechanism designed specifically to cocoon people, namely tenure. But my guess would be that the main way it encourages the psychopaths is not so much that tenure protects them, but that having veto power over other people's tenure is a very good tool to enforce compliance.
Not really. It is bad. But I've grown thick skinned to it now. It's water under the bridge, and in the scheme of things, small fry. But if I was feeling vindictive I'd get lawyered up with a great libel advisor and write a book about some of the nonsense I've seen, or personally been party to in "academia"; including extraordinary sexism and constructive dismissal of women lecturers, a university that conned people out of their property, lots of crooked real-estate deals (many UK universities are foremost property developers who happen to do some teaching and research on the side), obvious bribes from industry on ICT contracts, blatant fraud on QAA audits, students who were deliberately led to catch Covid during the pandemic to save a few quid on housing allocation... I could go on all day, that's just a few things off the top of my head.
And I can speak freely about stuff that is already public. Just take a look at London Middlesex University and their record for shutting down whole departments on ideological grounds and turfing students who are still midway through studies out the door. It's cheaper to pay the compensation to the students who are brave enough to go through the months and years of formal complaints procedure. Academia is a well protected business.
> > there are ways of being cocooned and cloistered in academia which isolate one from consequences found in the world of real business
> Given your experience, I'd be very curious to hear what the main mechanisms your witnessed for side-stepping consequences for psychopathic behaviour actually were.
This isn't the forum for deep discussion, or too much acidic denouncing, but I do suggest reading Ginsberg's "Fall of the Faculty" and some of Henry Giroux's work. Both would be labelled "shrill leftists", in a domain that ironically is already considered "too left liberal". However, that consideration of orthodox political spectrum strikes me as irrelevant in this age. What is the problem is the terrifying rate at which good people are being ousted, or taking early retirement, or jumping ship from quite senior academic posts to modest industry roles just to get away from the bullshit. Also terrifying is the rate at which real teaching and research is being set aside for cookie-cutter subsidised training for Big-Tech entry - a general decline in the intellectual quality of everything we teach. Even in traditional strong holdouts like Cambridge and Oxford I hear the same. I think we're in real crisis in the universities now.
One of my favorite movies of all time, In The Loop [1] deals with exactly that. It's extremely funny, and dark.
My tutor then pointed me to a better maths textbook which was actually worth the money, shame I didn't know about that before!
> Not Bello herself, not the staff at LitHub, not the journalist who wrote the Gawker piece and not even any of the readers of that piece. While I clearly found it fine on my own, the fact that there has been zero outreach is, in a word, surprising.
Because few people care about the victim, and everyone seems to obsess over the perpetrator.
I don't know how well the far more severe crimes in our society map in this context, but at least with serial or spree killings, there's an effort to take attention away from the perpetrator due to media fixation on them and instead redirecting it towards healing the injuries (https://www.dontnamethem.org/). I don't think it's exactly 1 for 1, but I think the sociological mechanics are probably the same here:
If it's not local to the reader, the reader is more likely to be fascinated by the perpetrator rather than go out of their way to heal the injured, or learn from the happening in any tangible way.
It's pretty unpleasant and chastening a lot of the time, and you have to develop a hard skin for cold-calling and being blown off, or having people vent at you. But if you don't do it, you don't know all the angles, and you haven't finished your job.
I wonder if the "Say His Name" protests actually caused that to happen since it was a rare case where we heard George Floyd's name so much he became the main character of that story in our minds.
The Atlantic has an article in the current issue mentioning Medgar Evers. As it happens, I do remember the name of the man who shot Evers, was acquitted then and convicted thirty or forty years later. But I have to fish in my memory for it. I certainly don't remember the names of the Manson adherents who killed Sharon Tate, a bit later in the 1960s.
So is that one remembers the side with fewer names?
They don't even include a link to his piece on Plagiarism Today about the issue, despite linking to LitHub's statement about the issue in a separate edit.
Here, where it's done in a published work, the original author can be aggrieved that they didn't get a citation (or in rare cases, royalties) but mostly it's the publisher and readers who are being let down.
I guess the main case where there is a serious injury to the original author is where they were not famous and the plagiarist is, and the original author gets suspected of being the plagiarist
In my first year of college I had to write a short essay for an English course. I was rather lazy as well as a fan of wordplay so I wrote an essay describing the life and work of an obscure 19th-century philosopher, who also happened to be completely fictional. Since I could just pull the "facts" out of my ass, it was easy to write.
A week later I was called in by the English department and had a sit down with two grim looking teachers. They confronted me with suspicions of plagiarism. Most of their case was built on my use of the word "gamut", which they thought a 19-year-old non-native speaker was not supposed to know. I was incensed (as well as flattered), but they only relented after I pointed out that the essay was an acrostic. The first letters of the paragraphs spelled the word "humbug".
For example: a native Italian speaker who is not very fluent in English will first think of velocity rather than speed, because speed is velocità in Italian.
It reminds me of time a colleague was on the bus. Someone pressed the bell to stop when they didn't mean to. A voice with a strong foreign accent piped up from the back "I apologies, I depressed the indicator but do not wish to alight". It was absolutely perfect english that no native speaker would utter.
I always struggled with the formal and informal forms in French and later when I was trying to learn Japanes, and tended to err on the side of the formal, so I'm sure I'd have sounded similar.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number...
I suspect this contributes to the size of the English lexicon.
When I went to High School in Utah it was after going to a really advanced Junior High in Oregon, and I was very spoiled and felt that the work was boring and beneath me.
One of the classes I took I should have been grateful for as a dream class for a kid like me, it was a class on reading Science Fiction and Fantasy where you had to write a book report on the books read (once a week, once every two weeks? don't remember, maybe once per month).
I generally read a book every day or two, and I wrote quite quickly so it shouldn't have been difficult. But I found these book reports difficult to write because they had a template for how they wanted the reports written that I found insulting to the books I had read, if I had read a book I liked I didn't want to insult it that way, and if I read a book I didn't like I didn't want to think about it any more.
So I hit on the expedient solution of writing book reports on fake books, I don't remember any of the books other than one that was a stereotypical Fantasy quest to stop the dark lord thing, called "The Hinterlands of Horlon" ugh, of course I gave it a negative review with some bright spots just keep anyone from being interested in reading it.
Didn't get found out though.
Although I do have some books I have written there is not much money in being an author unless one succeeds wildly and so I have not put the effort into publication as that is not the interesting part of writing.
It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that these books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them. That was Carlyle’s procedure in Sartor Resartus, Butler’s in The Fair Haven—though those works suffer under the imperfection that they themselves are books, and not a whit less tautological than the others. A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books.
[1] https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2017/06/21/the-borges-test/
> “I’m interested stories of redemption…”
(I checked the source and there is an 'in' in the original.)
> that seemed to be very what this essay was about
> essay is over 4,500 long.
> writing process wasn’t the focus essay
> focuses heavily on the struggles of her over the year
Although I don't think that last one is an example of a missing word. It's awkwardly phrased, but the grammar still works AFAICT.
I don't know anything about the inner workings of the biz. How does someone who hasn't published her first book yet become hotly anticipated? I get the second book being hotly anticipated, but the first?
It's the long answer as well.
It's often the way novelists are able to attract an agent, and by extension a publishing contract.
At that point the 'anticipation' is often just the effect of the publisher's marketing efforts.
The process of getting a first novel published goes something like this (I'm eliding a lot of the hard work involved to be able to answer the question and failure to progress can happen at any stage of the process):
1. Write the book
2. Query agents until someone agrees to represent you.
3. After development work between agent and author,¹ the agent will then shop the work around to one or more editors at publishing houses.
4. If multiple editors are interested in purchasing the work, there can either be an auction where they bid to publish the work or an editor can issue what’s called a pre-empt where before it can go to auction, they’ll offer a large advance hoping to guarantee their house gets the book.
It’s the multiple editors interested in the work that generates most of the pre-publication buzz for a debut author. Yes, it can help to have published some prominent short works before the first novel, but it’s exceedingly rare for someone to gain much notice from this. Outside of a very short list of prominent magazines (the big national mags: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s plus a very short list of smaller publication The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s), the sad truth is that most of the readers of literary magazines are writers² and maybe literary agents scouting for new talent.³ When someone without at least an agent if not a previously published book has a story in The New Yorker, it’s a major event which was at least in part why “Cat People” was such a big deal when it was published a couple years back.
⸻
1. Starting in the 80s, this has become increasingly where a lot of editorial work on fiction happens.
2. This is the big conundrum for publishers of said magazines and a generally unspoken but widely acknowledged reality. I have an incubating project that will maybe with a few years’ of cultivation, expose a small number of non-writers to some of the best stuff available online.
3. The magazines that agents look at is not much longer than the first list. Looking at the table of contents of the past few years’ Best American Short Stories will surface almost all of the magazines in agents’ reading lists.
I'd be interested in this, since I enjoy short stories as an art form but discoverability is poor. Any current recommended resources for finding short works? I don't care about hipster cred for 'discovering' an author, just for finding new short literary fiction that isn't being published in the major magazines.
There are a lot of ways to show promise in academia long before your first book.
I was once approached by a young job recruiter. Since I am a fan of literary and linguistic issues and he had a master's degree in German studies, I googled for his master's thesis. Interesting topic, which I will leave unnamed here because.... Because I found an Austrian bachelor's thesis posted online ten years before this master's thesis, by a different person but with the same topic. And in my opinion with a quite similar structure and analog passages. Since my interest was piqued, I researched further and found the doctoral thesis of the professor who had supervised the master's thesis. Another twenty years older. It was based on the same book as the master's thesis and the baccalaureate thesis with a broadly related topic, though of course much more in-depth and expanded. Unfortunately, the book was not 'Felix Krull'.
All three writings, however, were, in my opinion, excellent in terms of craftsmanship.
As Nietzsche taught us, nothing is true everything is permitted.
We are taught how to plagiarise at university; where it is encouraged, and, you are marked on how well you do it. Paraphrasing is demanded of you. Repeating in your own words the content of other sources. Good marks for regurgitating the ideas of others with a false patina of creativity: rephrasing, synthesizing and summarizing your source material.
It is a foul process with a false idol at its core: placing dishonest "creativity" on a pedestal, artistic license instead of honest copying of the source material, a sham instead of giving the source proper recognition.
The real world mostly values execution, not a conceptual hall of mirrors, not ideas continuously warped and reflected with gross academic variations.
Edit: "Plagiarise in your own words (citation please)" would be a way to say it ;-)
To use a coding equivalent, to refactor code you have to understand it. Refactoring is not the same as rearranging some functions and moving some arguments around.
The process should be: 1) read 2) summarise into bullet points 3) write in your own words. Not 1) copy paste entire paragraph 2) rephrase/reorder to "make it yours"
Which means that pretty much any factual claim you make needs a citation, any third party interpretations require a citation, and if your essay is just a laundry list of citations, you failed to actually write an essay.
*Restate and reorder*
Use these sentence starters to repackage the sentence
Change the order of the sentence
A thesaurus is a useful tool here
*Paraphrasing step by step*
This step by step process can be used to put the ideas of other authors into your own words.
1. Write down or paste a photocopy of the passage.
2. List some key ideas, concepts, and phrases from the passage.
3. Where possible, note down alternative phrases or synonyms for each of these.
4. Rewrite, using those alternative words and phrases.
5. Can you simplify further?
6. Insert the name of the author.
Rewriting to improve can be worthwhile. Forced rewriting teaches strange outcomes. My suspicion is that the plagiariser from the article went through the university process and has learnt some of their behaviour from that process.
Plagiarism is taking someone else's work and presenting it as your own, original, work. The two are fundamentally different. Confusion between them is the essence of the problem at hand.
If the author referred to in the original article had cited the plagiarism website, there would be no issue here whatsoever. It's the misrepresentation of others' ideas and rhetoric as one's own (paraphrased or otherwise) that's the problem here.
What exactly do they think is the intellectual value of rearranging words and substituting synonyms? Calling that synthesis and summation is like pushing bricks around in a circle and calling it construction.
I was shocked when I took over a thesis course and students were asking what was the acceptable score. They also told me that students had failed previously due to a too high score because turnitin picked up the reference list as plagiarised. Now this is clearly the fault of teachers, but the increasing demands on them, plus the turnitin advertising to easy the burden by making this score is also partly to blame IMO.
Part of the problem with plagiarism in the abstract is that much of the work being submitted is not novel. Every one of us has been taught to read something, and then regurgitate it in a mildly different form to prove our successful learning of it. And our schools are spending tax dollars to buy access to these systems.
"how close we are" ...? The automated plagiarism engines have always had huge amounts of false positives. Essentially they are only useful for highlighting what they detected. Some of the things that I have seen them false detect: Direct cited quotes, common phrases and sentence structures. Factual explanations, e.g. a description of a specific aperatus which can only really be described in one way (even though exact wording differed). Reference lists, this was by far the most common reason for very high turnitin scores, when I used it turnitin was completely unable to pick up a reference list.
The plagiarism scores of these systems are completely useless, I've found obvious plagiarism in work with scores of less than 3% (which is a very common score even if you would write an essay now) while I've had work with scores of >50% which were completely fine. Any teacher who uses the turnitin score for anything should be fired IMO, because they do not understand plagiarism.
In Bello’s article, for example, she wrote the following:
Plagiarism has been with us since the birth of language and art. For as long as there have been words to be read, there has been someone there copying the passages. It goes as far back as 8 AD with the poet Martial who caught another poet Fidentinus reciting his work. He called Fidentinus a plagiarus, meaning a “kidnapper.”
Compare that to this 2011 article in Plagiarism Today, titled “The World’s First ‘Plagiarism’ Case.”
Plagiarism, the act of taking another’s work and passing it off as your own, has almost certainly been with us since the dawn of artwork and written language. For as long as there has been art and artists, there have been people who have put their name to it incorrectly.
But while the act of plagiarism is as old as time, the word “plagiarism” is not. The etymology of the word plagiarism is an interesting one and its history actually dates back to the first century AD and involves a Roman poet and his literary “kidnappers” who became the subject of a literary beating.
[0] https://www.scribbr.com/frequently-asked-questions/is-paraph...
[1] https://law-richmond.libguides.com/c.php?g=998384&p=7227189
She reportedly plagiarized during college, but was able to manipulate people into letting her get away with it. It would have been better to fail fast, fail early, recover soon, than to get away with plagiarism until this late in the game and then get caught so publicly.
^That's a terribly written sentence but at least its not plagiarized
I have not done it, but I'd be shocked if it wasn't the case that almost every college kid engages in plagiarism at least once. (Plagiarism includes downloading answers off Chegg and submitting them as your own, an activity sufficiently common that some of my students complained to me about the injustice of not getting points because the answer they copied off Chegg was wrong.)
People learn. It is easier to learn to change your behavior when the consequences are low. Learning environments are constructed in such a way so that people can make mistakes and learn from them. The way it was described, it sounds like in college, the author would incorporate texts into her own work without citation. A likely consequence for this behavior, in college, is to fail the course.
Reportedly, she manipulated people into letting her get away with it. As a result, it was easier for her to believe that what she was doing was right.
> [...] being willing to do it (whether you're a college "kid" or not) says something striking about your character [...]
Character is somewhat malleable and most morals (like "do not plagiarize") must be taught. I agree with Xunzi's take on human nature here. At birth we are self-centered and have no moral compass. We have the capacity to become good people through education and discipline, although not everyone does.
Everyone, right? If she gets caught early and stops, that's better than her doing it a ton because it means there's less plagiarism.
Just sits wrong that it's possible for people to do that and feel good about it.
When I was a teenager I collected a couple of head-scratchers like this. I’d say they were ironic but I’d be afraid of being wrong.
First: visited church with my grandparents, received a typewritten postcard a week or two later. Quote: “Thank you for visiting our church last Sinday.”
Second: was listening to my favorite radio station, a local university-run station. One of the students who ran it read an editorial about complaints regarding pronunciation. She defended the personalities, said they were after all just students.
The irony: she repeatedly mispronounced “mispronunciation”.
I was 14 at the time, so didn’t have the courage to call and point that out, but I have to assume someone did.
Personally, I love All Along the Watchtower by Bob Dylan and like the Jimi Hendrix version. And I love all these EDM remixes of the old classics. Losing my Religion hits different when it's powered by a sick beat.
Anyway, if there was just some pleasant way to remix by just sticking them in a chapter footnote or a page footnote rather than having to explicitly say "It's a lie to make up a text like BLOCKQUOTE As Ursula Le Guin says BLOCKQUOTE The moon is a harsh mistress is a terrible book especially when Heinlein says BLOCKQUOTE There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him"
Fortunately our teacher was substituted and we had done a presentation like it before. So I took my last presentation, changed the name to something vaguely different (as I knew it would be written down), repeated my last presentation word for word and no one was the wisest. Saw a few grins as my classmates started realizing what's going on ^^;
_edit_
I'm not from an English speaking country in case anyone is wondering.
A very common case of copying without attribution is in contracts and policies, which are nearly always adapted from existing documents. Probably this doesn't count as plagiarism because nobody expects these things to be original, authors are not named, and there is no tradition of citing sources. (However, in many cases it probably is copyright violation, even if nobody cares to complain about it.)
The thing with plagiarism is that it's either (almost) verbatim or it's not plagiarism, because, otherwise, everything is plagiarism. That's how culture and ideas work.
I can restate Plato's model of concrete things being mere shadows of abstract ideals however I damn well please, but if I don't mention that I got that idea from Plato, it's still plagarism.
One time pretty much all the kids in my Chemistry class copied my homework, at that time I had the reputation for knowing what I was doing.
Unfortunately there was a key error in one of my solutions, and all the other kids copied my solution faithfully - including the error.
The teacher figured out pretty quickly what had happened and decided on an unusual reponse. He corrected my solution fully ... in my book. In everyone else's book the only thing he wrote was:
"See $logifail's book"
We didn't do that again!
Looking at that again I really didn't choose my words very carefully, sorry. No published books here! Two exceeedingly minor scientific papers, but fortunately my misdeeds in school Chemistry were long forgotten by then.
OT but interestingly in German there's a clear distinction in such cases between the word "Buch" (= book, of the sort that you read from) and the word "Heft" (= exercise book, of the soft-bound variety that you write in).
(I once wrote a book that was based in part on reworked blog posts from various places. When I submitted for Kindle, it got flagged. But I submitted some links and everything was OK.)
On the other hand, if someone commissions me to write an article on something, I generally speaking shouldn't reuse much directly from past articles.
Am I getting that right?
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Yes, pretty much.
And in the interest of adding a further meta-layer, your synopsis might have benefitted from an unattributed paraphrased section from the article.
Besides that, citations make a great way to pursue further reading. If an interesting idea gets mentioned in passing in an essay I'm reading, then if it's cited I can go read that other work. That's why you're supposed to cute your own works, when an idea in a given essay is just lifted from something else you wrote. I, as a reader, can then go check out that work, and in turn be lead to the ideas that helped shape that one by the citations in that work.
I don't know if you used google in the past, like, 5 years, but it proves this statement trivially false.
Now he was copying his own words, so the ethics are somewhat murkier. I would still argue it's bad form to do this for a work for hire like the turnitin piece. Moreover it seems he also does not follow his own advice of not taking passages from other texts for later rewriting.
I've noticed that there has been much more downvoting recently. The weird thing is that often posts a few levels down, in both sides of a discussion would get downvoted even though they seemed to make perfectly fine arguments (that I might have agreed or disagreed with). It almost feels like there is some bots that randomly apply votes in discussions.
But really, how is it that we've come so far as a society and just scream at things like these ? Isn't knowledge supposed to be shared ? Even if it's not properly attributed ? There are plenty of misattributions in Mathematics, theorems who people did not create or develop at all, yet their name has been recited for years and years in elementary and middle schools. Yet teachers will say that plagiarism is bad! But hey, don't worry if we call this theorem like this because this is ok and it's actually not plagiarism. We're literally just regurgitating ideas, as several commenters have said (good luck getting the primary sources for my comment lol).
Also, should my ideas be considered plagiarized even when I thought of them before someone else published them ? Interesting dilema, at least for me.
If I write an article that uses someone else's ideas, then I cite them, so that a reader can go "huh, that idea's interesting, let me go see where that came from" and then they can see what influenced those ideas by that papers citations and so on and so on.
The fact that students don't have this concept of intellectual chain of custody hammered into their skulls is a failure of the education system. Citing quotes is obvious, but in this day and age it's probably the least necessary. I can Google an exact quote and find exactly the article it came from. Much harder to search is provinance of paraphrased idea or general concept, or the source of a factual statement that I find dubious.
Degrees are awarded off the back of people producing work. If you reproduce another's work instead of creating something original, even if you then go on to make superficial modifications afterwards, you have not produced work and gaining qualifications off the back of that is fraudulent. Citations of sourced work, among other things, exist to declare the parts of work which are not your own.
It's refreshing to see a lack of critique or commentary to the above statement with regards to gender, race, mental status, or any other categorization. But plagiarism does not appear to be a universal violation of ethics when discovered. [2]
[1] https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2022/05/09/plagiarism-today-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism
> I got an alert from WordPress that my site stats were “booming”.
Doesn't seem like it here.
Plagiarize! Let noone else's work evade your eyes. [1]
[1] Plagiarised because I'm not telling you where it's from. Wooo.
I can see how the plagiarised person can be a victim, as I've said. Such a person could be deprived of money and status that is their due while it is garnered by the plagiarist. Morally that is straight up theft, for mine. I just don't see it, or much like it here. This is not a defense of plagiarisim that I'm making.
It's not a massive point and it definitely isn't terribly important. I just feel like it's describing yourself as a victim of theft if someone tries to break into your car, does no damage to it, fails to steal anything and accidentally leaves a few hundred dollar bills behind that are legally awarded to you as their finder. Victim? Maybe a professional writer could use a word to convey the meaning they're trying to convey without the nuance I'm objecting to here? Has there ever been an easier case to "refuse to be a victim" than this one? The plagiarised party is, in some small way, cashing in on the experience and good luck to them!
Seems like the plagiarist is getting some kind of justice and everyone can form their own view on the appropriateness of its roughness and whether no viable alternative to it exists and so on in the all the usual ways.
[1] Tom Lehrer for anyone playing along at home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQHaGhC7C2E
Think about it. If you saw someone holding a blood-covered knife in their hand, and an angry look on their face, you would be able to guess he/she committed a murder. But then, your next thought would be to know who was murdered?
But this does not seem to be the case with plagiarism. Perhaps because victim is not really the victim. It's just a way for people to obtain some schadenfreude. In the same way that the mob involved in a mob lynching does not do it for victim, or "justice", but plainly to get pleasure out of the act.
Actually, no! Stories about murderers track way higher in news media than stories about the murdered. Especially when it's a particularly heinous spree killing.