Live data from Hacker News

Plagiarism

notes.unwieldy.net

131–140 of 326 posts

Re: Plagiarism

#131
post #53
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…

Here's my impression of the sequence of events, based on the blog post: 1) You post an article which includes several facts that are taken directly from Joshua's article. No credit is given to the original author. 2) Joshua publicly calls you out on this. 3) You quickly edit in a credit and a link to the original article. 4) With the awareness that future readers will see this credit and assume that Joshua is making…

The facts are one thing. What's really damning is the structure in which those facts are presented. If you compare the original appearance of TNW's article with Joshua's article, the paragraphs are almost identical, with a few words changed here and there.

Re: Plagiarism

#132
post #71

Where are all the people defending "piracy" on this post? How much effort were a few paragraphs that got copied vs how much effort does it take to produce a movie, or a professionally recorded song?

Here we go again!

Piracy and plagiarism are different things. Piracy is when you copy something without permission. Plagiarism is when you fail to attribute a source.

Piracy as we discuss it here almost never involves plagiarism. Have you ever seen a movie torrent where the movie was claimed to be produced by some pirate group instead of the actual movie studio that really made it? I've never even heard of such a thing.

The community here tends to find plagiarism far more distasteful than piracy. And there's absolutely nothing inconsistent about that. There is no reason that these two quite disparate concepts require someone to have a common stance on both.

Re: Plagiarism

#133

The old adage is you can't copyright facts and there was certainly no requirement for TNW to do any "original research" to share these findings. However, when you copy/use facts, you wade into hot water if you also copy the structure and the way those facts were originally expressed. The original TNW article shown here seems to step over that line with a barely masked copy of the original paragraphs. What bothers me…

I'd honestly much rather be brutally honest than go down the artificial PR route.

Brutally honest is OK. Brutally stupid, which is what your tweets look like to me, is not OK.

Re: Plagiarism

#135
post #114

Update: image credit added after I posted this. Still, the image should be removed, this is copyright infringement. TheNextWeb is infamous for plagiarizing images for that section. Take this article, for example: http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/05/23/stylish-techno... The image at the top of the article is taken from this Dustin Curtis blog post: http://www.dustincurtis.com/press_on.html (the filename of the…

And another[1]: You should credit @dexterous for screenshot used @ http://thenextweb.com/in/2012/05/03/indian-isps-reportedly-blocking-access-to-vimeo-and-some-torrent-sites/ Citation: http://twitpic.com/9gr7y9 https://twitter.com/#!/dexterous/status/198036547830947841 [1] https://twitter.com/#!/dnene/statuses/198122429447548928

To clarify: I credited the source where I found the article, quite clearly, in the text prior to the image. I thought (wrongly, it would seem) that Rediff News had produced the image themselves.

I did not see the tweet from Dhananjay, and never got an email or anything else about it. Now that I have seen it, I have credited my source, as I always attempt to do.

Re: Plagiarism

#136

Tech journalism is broken. Someone fix it. Please.

Maybe we can start by not referring to a lot of tech blogs as journalism. Some are, but most aren't - including many that would like us to think they are.

Then we'd have to stop referring to a lot of what goes on TV, radio, and in the newspapers as journalism.

Re: Plagiarism

#137
post #129
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're called typos. Everybody makes them — even professional writers. In writing that's intended to make money, they're usually caught in editing. If you yourself write without ever producing a typo, that's nice, but it's not really all that important to the craft of writing — much less to owning a business that employs writers. At any rate, I don't see any reason to expect perfect prose in an informal context like…

Unfortunately, in this case, the typos reinforce the idea this person is fundamentally disrespectful. Given that his comments here are part of a PR campaign, he should be taking more care with them in order to make the right impression. I go by Michele -- with one L. It is my actual middle name. People routinely misspell it with two L's. Sometimes they realize it and apologize for the error. I have found that how som…

Sure, I agree, there are lots of aspects of his public persona that he could stand to work on. It doesn't make calling out typos less petty or more interesting. The difference between "Person makes harmless typo" and "Person I don't like makes harmless typo" is in your emotions, not in the substance of the comment.

Re: Plagiarism

#138
There needs to be some sort of standard for citing other peoples work, sort of like an updated Chicago Manual of Style (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation#Citation_styles) for online publications. These days we have all these content mills that put out very little original work... I don't know what the proper method should be, how much work you can take etc. Also remember this - The New York Times spent weeks writing an article about how Wal-mart and Target learn your secrets and then Forbes wrote a knock-off that stole a bunch of their traffic. http://nickoneill.com/how-fortune-stole-a-new-york-times-art...

This also reminds me that as much as possible we should try to link to the original source on HackerNews, it's in the guidelines! (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Back in July, I spent a lot of time putting together an infographic for FeeFighters on the tech boom and bubble (http://feefighters.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/tech-...). We got links back from tons of magazines, including Forbes, Mashable, Fast Company, etc. Many of them didn't link to either us or KissMetrics (our partner who did the design work), but most complied after sending an email or tweet. One place, Bostinno - refused to link to us at all, despite multiple tweets and emails to them, for some reason deciding to credit Mashable: http://bostinno.com/2011/07/13/are-we-in-a-tech-boom-or-bubb... Massholes.

Re: Plagiarism

#139
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.

The fact that this guy may be wrong does not justify brutally downvoting his comments until they are nearly invisible. That detracts enormously from the discussion and makes HN look like vindictive children.

Re: Plagiarism

#140
post #13

Yes, you were plagiarized. TheNextWeb was in the wrong, and they made it worse by their reaction. But I also feel that the main insights of your posts were not your own. They were that of the NY Times reporter Michael M. Grynbaum. That is, I feel the main insight of your post were two things: the doubling of tips, and the attribution of this to the buttons on the credit-card machine. Your contribution was to look up…

I think you bring up a reasonable point: that the forced tipping system with no values below 20% was previously discussed in other articles such as that of Grynbaum from January 8, 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/nyregion/new-nyc-livery-ca... In fact it's not a secret at all since New Yorkers and those visiting the city are quite acquainted with the system, it's no secret, so I am not sure Mr. Grynbaum is a r…

> Worth mentioning is the article on the usability blog from which Mr. Gross hotlinked his image of the interface

Although Mr Gross did not hotlink the image. Notice the images locations and file types are different.

Post reply on HN