Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Plagiarism

notes.unwieldy.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 326 posts

Re: Plagiarism

#61

Post by praptak »

zeedotme wrote: post #28
Braasch wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author should have put quotes around the paragraphs that were blatantly copy and only slightly tweaked to show it came directly from the piece and wasn't written by Harrison. Oh, and your Twitter response was laughably immature to me.

that I can appreciate, but to come out and call it "plagiarism" publicly although we couldn't have done more to reference him...is absurd to me. Feels like this guy is trolling every single one of us here - myself included - to get a reaction.

> we couldn't have done more to reference him

Obviously you could have done more: reference him right from the start, not only after he made a stink about you copy-pasting his material verbatim. Timing matters, earlier is more.

This is unless he's lying that you did it only after the fact. Care to explain this point? Edit: I see you already did elsewhere in this tread.

Re: Plagiarism

#62

Post by scott_s »

zeedotme wrote: post #56
andos wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A case of poor timing, I think. TNW posts a non-attributed version of the article [1]. Author complains on twitter. Meanwhile, TNW notices the error and ninja-edits the post with proper attribution [2]. You check the updated post. Drama ensues on twitter. Edit. Oi, I'm not saying TNW is in the right, people. Just pointing out something that their CEO seems to have missed. [1]. http://cl.ly/0q1C3n1j323R3C131X0d/o [2].…

funnily enough...that is actually exactly what just happened and I literally (only seconds ago) discovered it. Will be putting a piece up about it soon.

Please pay attention to what else we're saying - that the second piece isn't acceptable, either.

Re: Plagiarism

#63

Post by wmf »

jgmmo wrote: post #7

Sorry man, I read that article and thought it's insights were profound. I am sorry to hear that they basically just 'spun' your hard work. Doesn't seem fair that you do the hard work but they end up with the lions share of the hits... To SEO Experts: Should they have given the original author a 'canonical' link from that page? Would that have helped matters SEO wise?

IMO giving SEO juice doesn't excuse plagiarism.

Re: Plagiarism

#64

Post by TomGullen »

zeedotme wrote: post #9

Update: see this comment on HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972875 Zee from TNW here. Someone has to explain to me exactly what we should have done differently here. I honestly have absolutely no idea what we should have done differently here to illustrate an interesting fact with our readers and reference the original source (we did that twice in the article...even with his full name (a screenshot of which…

If you had used more quotations as supposed to plain copy and paste it would of made a lot of difference.

For example, .NET magazine covered one of our blog posts: http://www.netmagazine.com/news/startup-argues-dont-use-mp3-...

We were very happy they did this, and they did it in a very upfront and honest way. I didn't get that same feeling from your coverage of the OP's original article.

Re: Plagiarism

#66

Post by amouat »

michael_dorfman wrote: post #23
zeedotme wrote: post #9

Update: see this comment on HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972875 Zee from TNW here. Someone has to explain to me exactly what we should have done differently here. I honestly have absolutely no idea what we should have done differently here to illustrate an interesting fact with our readers and reference the original source (we did that twice in the article...even with his full name (a screenshot of which…

Someone has to explain to me exactly what we should have done differently here. I'll give it a shot. What you should have done, in my opinion, is just provide a link alongside a one-line summary, along the lines of "Here's an article we found fascinating." If the article you are writing is based on a single source, it's not an article-- it's a paraphrase. We work immensely had to product original content as well as l…

> it's not an article-- it's a paraphrase

If they had bothered to paraphrase, it would have been much better. They didn't - they just copied.

Re: Plagiarism

#67

Post by andos »

zeedotme wrote: post #56
andos wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A case of poor timing, I think. TNW posts a non-attributed version of the article [1]. Author complains on twitter. Meanwhile, TNW notices the error and ninja-edits the post with proper attribution [2]. You check the updated post. Drama ensues on twitter. Edit. Oi, I'm not saying TNW is in the right, people. Just pointing out something that their CEO seems to have missed. [1]. http://cl.ly/0q1C3n1j323R3C131X0d/o [2].…

funnily enough...that is actually exactly what just happened and I literally (only seconds ago) discovered it. Will be putting a piece up about it soon.

Real life needs some serious mutexing.

Re: Plagiarism

#68

Post by citricsquid »

zeedotme wrote: post #65

Zee from TNW again. There's been some confusion. Will post a follow up to this shortly to explain the mix up...but basically this HN commenter nails it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972875

So you (tnw) posted the article without attribution, the original author sees this, he tweets about it and asks wtf and then you (tnw) fix it and then you (personally) go on a tirade about how it's how the industry works blah blah blah conveniently ignoring that he knew it was originally not attributed and you reply as if it was, now you're admitting that you did in fact post it without attribution? All you had to do was apologise when he complained to you. You were in the wrong, whether it was an accident or not isn't the issue.

Re: Plagiarism

#69

Post by jack-r-abbit »

citricsquid wrote: post #20
zeedotme wrote: post #9

Update: see this comment on HN. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972875 Zee from TNW here. Someone has to explain to me exactly what we should have done differently here. I honestly have absolutely no idea what we should have done differently here to illustrate an interesting fact with our readers and reference the original source (we did that twice in the article...even with his full name (a screenshot of which…

The issue is you did not credit him initially. Are you saying that he was credited in the initial publication of the article and his screenshots that show this is not the case are fabricated?

The screen shots don't go all the way down to where the current version online has him credited twice. So it is hard to say if they were already there or if all three credits were added at the same time after being called out.

Re: Plagiarism

#70

Post by zeedotme »

scott_s wrote: post #62
zeedotme wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

funnily enough...that is actually exactly what just happened and I literally (only seconds ago) discovered it. Will be putting a piece up about it soon.

Please pay attention to what else we're saying - that the second piece isn't acceptable, either.

yes I appreciate many of you agree a quote should have been included rather than an attempted rewrite.

I agree, that would have been better.

However, calling us out for plagiarism does feel far too extreme when the updated piece clearly states the source of the facts. The original piece only included links without a name and that I agree is 100% wrong. I hadn't seen that original piece before we were called out on twitter and my reactions were clearly based on immediate emotions...never a good time to reply.

Again, will put all this into a single post soon.

Post reply on HN