A CAD editor last week discovered that an article from his Weblog appeared, text intact, on the Web site of a competitor, with no attribution. Imagine his shock!
He queried the Web site's owner, who apologized. It appears that a reader had forwarded the item, and the owner innocently believed the reader to be the source. The owner removed the offending item,and everyone is at peace again.
I commiserated with the CAD editor, noting that "Copy'n paste make it too easy" to plagiarize, knowingly or otherwise. Plagiarizing is presenting someone else's writing as your own. In this apparently post-modern world, where no-rules rule and shame is just a five-letter word found in older dictionaries, plagiarism remains a social crime, and rightfully so.
Slash.dot recently noted that an entertainment columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin newspaper was fired for lifting entire paragraphs of material from sources, including Wikipedia, without attribution. It's not plagiarism when you acknowledge the source -- it's as simple as that.
The columnist had been with the newspaper for 21 years, but was outed as a plagiarist after a Wikipedia editor noted similarities between the columns appearing in Hawaii and material posted to the online encyclopedia. He's been at his job as long as me in mine. What would cause him to plagiarize, accidentally or otherwise?
Weariness, I think. After writing about CAD for two decades, I find myself becoming weary of it, and other aspects of life. I can see the Honolulu columnist becoming tired of producing fresh, original written material week after week.
Copy'n paste. Forget to rewrite. No one notices. Repeat.
He forgot Grabowski's Postulate: The Internet is the great leveler. Whatever advantage you have, your contemporaries have the same. In this case of the Honolulu columnist, the Internet made it easy for him to plagiarize; but the Internet also made it easy for his contemporaries to discover he was copying the efforts of other people.
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