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Comment by tristanperry | Hacker News Reader

As an FYI, parts of this article have been taken without any attribution from:

http://download.intel.com/pressroom/kits/chipmaking/Making_o...

http://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/chipmaking/pdfs/Sand...

An example being the sentence "Sand, especially quartz, has high percentages of silicon in the form of silicon dioxide (SiO2) and is the base ingredient for semiconductor manufacturing." which seems to have been copied almost word for word.

Other parts of the article appear to have been simply rewritten from other - more reputable/original - sources too.

So to sum up, this source shouldn't be upvoted, IMO.

Also as an FYI, I love how Google rank this on page 1 for [How a CPU is made]... (indeed, above the original sources)

View on HN

Those links appear at the bottom of the page. So unless the author added them just now after seeing your comment... I'm glad plagiarism by itself is not a crime, there are some real witch hunters out there. (You can find a lot of them by looking up Einstein's history.) If I were Google I'd probably favor an HTML page over a PDF too when the content is more or less the same.

He/She (there's no author name) has added them after seeing this comment - I had the tab open for an hour now and there's no attribution there: http://d.pr/6mlz (in case you're wondering about the bizarre colorful thing, it's YouTube! It's blocked in Iran and instead of the video, they display garbage links to government websites)

The links were added recently :)

And it's not really witch hunting - I'm merely pointing out that it's bad form for someone to plagiarise and not attribute the source.

Still not a fan of word-for-word copying, but at least links have been added :)

Just after the video, the two links you provided are mentioned.

Maybe other sources are more reputable/original, but this article sums them up nicely and in an enjoyable read, which those PDFs are not (from image quality to layout). Form indeed matters.

Form matters, but so does plagiarism. It's one thing to paraphrase and present information from another source in an easier to read manner; it's another to lift entire phrases word for word without attribution. As others have pointed out, the attribution was only added after the complaint here on HN, and only addressed those particular phrases, it did not list any other sources that may have been used.

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