Plagiarism

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

I dunno talk_politics community standards but plagiarism shouldn't be acceptable.

I'm not going to call anyone out, not directly. But it was pointed out that an entry with over 100 comments is a lightly edited version of one by a profession pundit. Frankly I agree.


In a private conversation, another opinion stated that, It's more than "lightly edited," it's the same story rephrased completely differently using the same videos. and later explained, We consistently have long posts that ipaste liberally from news reports and such, so there'd be no issue even then. Perhaps this is true, but I don't like it.

Let me tell you an story. We used to have a great reporter here who used to climb up into the rafters of CityHall to eavesdrop in on the closed door sessions and reported what was going on. Later this reporter was elected Mayor and eventually Premier of the Province. People didn't always like what he did or what he had to say, but he was never caught in a lie. Ralph Klein was perhaps one of the only honest politicians. This not only made him a great Premier, loved by many, but also made him hated and the target of much criticism.

Well shortly before Ralph Klein retired as Premier an investigative journalist accused him of plagiarizing an essay on Chile for his degree in communications. It wasn't so much that he copy/pasted whole paragraphs, but that he failed to cite his internet sources. The university cleared him, saying the infraction was relatively minor, but still his critics, never willing to let a grudge go, never fail to bring this up whenever he makes the news.

This community is just for fun. I don't mean to place too much importance on it's importance, if you catch my drift. But really, how hard is it to cite a source? I mean if somebody is going to copy/paste/lightly edit somebody else's work, the only reason to do so it to disguise the origin and pass it off as your own. It's probably better find something so completely obscure that it can't be found in a simple google search of the text you used.

Better yet, why not just write your own piece? For myself it's often amazing to discover my own opinions that are only revealed to myself through my writing. I have learned that the process of writing is the process of forming my perspectives on subjects.

Comments

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Ahh I should have known something that blindingly hypocritical would be Malkin

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

While it does reuse the same video, there's not much commentary by Malkin.

Looking over it, I don't see the plagiarism.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

If it was by Chomsky, would you still hold the same position?

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

You're free to borrow the same ideas and arguments used by other people. Only when you borrow their words and the flow of their argument does it become problematic.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

To be fair, he wasn't really arguing against the position, just whether it was plagiarism or not. Frankly that's slightly irrelevant to the post he replied to, as either way its directly from the ideas of crazy woman.

[bord-du-rasoir.livejournal.com]

The plagiarism in question comes from the large grey blocks of text— not Malkin's words.

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

I see that but mostly it's the recounting of events. So it's not really out of the line to follow the same flow.

I've had people rip off arguments I made line for line. Now that's egregious.