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

251–260 of 326 posts

Re: Plagiarism

#251

Post by ktizo »

zeedotme wrote: post #11
petercooper wrote: post #3

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.

Apologising for plagiarism isn't artificial PR if you mean it.

All I get from this comment is that you basically don't give a shit, which also means you really should not be an editor as that role is entirely about accepting responsibility for what gets published.

Have you been taking notes from the tabloids by any chance?

If you have you had better have the bank balance to back the attitude because that is the only way they get away with this kind of shit while still remaining in business.

Re: Plagiarism

#252

Post by Tsagadai »

moron wrote: post #83

All these shitheel sites do the same thing. BusinessInsider often doesn't even do the work of lightly rewriting paragraphs, they just rip content off wholesale. It's a dirty game, but I dunno if much can be done to stop it. The CEO's reaction is a disaster unto itself. Shameful.

This is the sad path that modern journalism seems destined to take. Old players go out of business or adjust their content towards articles for broader audiences (read: crass, controversial, gossip and conspiracies). Most online news consists of barely rewritten press releases. No research, no editing, no moral compass. Unfortunately, it is also what people want and it sells ad revenue.

The old boss was a sleazebag in a suit who would hit on the secretary but he ran a newsroom. The new boss is a petulant child who doesn't give a fuck about anyone else or know any better.

I wonder if in 10 years we will be able to read about war from a source that isn't twitter, the governments involved, NGOs or a weapons company press release?

Re: Plagiarism

#253

Post by chris_wot »

zeedotme wrote: post #11
petercooper wrote: post #3

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.

It appears we are following your advise. Please allow me to add my voice to the general baying - don't be a dick. Don't plagiarise the work of others.

Re: Plagiarism

#254

Post by droithomme »

grandalf wrote: post #233
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…

It's clear from the screenshots the original author captured that you tried to deny responsibility after you changed the plagiarized content. If he didn't have the screenshots you might have gotten away with it. Since he had the screenshots, your posts all come off as dishonest (which they obviously are). Your attempt to bully the original author on Twitter looks bad too. I think every comment you make is digging a d…

Speaking of the screenshots, it's not only what you say, but on Zee Kane's twitter feed, he has accused the true author of having misrepresented the before and after screen shots:

http://twitter.com/#!/Zee/status/202124995923681280

> Zee Kane: "he [Mr. Gross] doesn't have screenshots of the whole article…You don't that's pretty sly?"

It is clear this is highly disingenuous argument and a false implication that Mr. Gross's screenshots misrepresent the situation. This is a carefully constructed and extremely dishonest (because it's false) attempt to attack Mr. Gross's credibility, which is blatantly being done in bad faith.

In addition to this attack, elsewhere on this thread here at HN, Mr. Zane, after all this went down and he knows what really happened, accuses Mr. Gross of being a troll:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972861

> Zee Kane: "Feels like this guy [Mr. Gross] is trolling every single one of us here - myself included - to get a reaction."

This leads one to speculate whether what he then calls an "apology", posted as a bit.ly link at http://bit.ly/JxoWae which then redirects to an obscure Google doc link rather than on his own web site, is sincere.

Re: Plagiarism

#255

Post by officemonkey »

joering2 wrote: post #127
gojomo wrote: post #112

Zee/TheNextWeb has a history of copying others' work without permission, including for one period HN comments. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=640492 Note that what I was concerned about was not respectful excerpting: for a time, they were scraping every HN comment related to their links back to their site, without permission/notification to authors, without threading, with NOFOLLOW.

Would be great to have a kickstarter for suing dirtbags, like in this example. Classactionstarter or something...

douchestarter.

Re: Plagiarism

#256

Post by noonespecial »

"We have a great many writers that submit articles to us. We do our best to make sure stuff like this doesn't happen, but sometimes it does anyway. We'll fix it right now with credit and a link to your blog. Sorry about that, bro."

See? Fixed. Easy.

Re: Plagiarism

#257

Post by chris_wot »

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.

Way to go with the ad hominem attack! As has by now been pointed out many, many times, your plagiarism, subsequent tweets and then coverup aren't acceptable.

Re: Plagiarism

#259

Post by scott_s »

talaketu wrote: post #247
scott_s wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamentally, plagiarism is about passing someone else's work off as your own. Note that this is possible even if you cite that work .

I agree with your 1st sentence, but not your 2nd. Citation is the act of declaring a source. http://web.mit.edu/academicintegrity/citing/whatandwhy.html (To be honest, I got this link from wikipedia :)

That's my entire point: declaring a source does not save you from plagiarizing. It is still possible to give the reader the impression that something is your work even though it is not, yet still citing a source. I think that the revised post on TNW is just that.

Re: Plagiarism

#260

Post by chris_wot »

zeedotme wrote: post #70
scott_s wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tw…

Yes, you attributed. But you very deliberately copied the article and posted it as your own work. You can't even say that you forgot to add quote marks as the text was slightly altered - evidently to give you an "out" if anyone accused you of direct copying.

Your threats afterward made things worse - much worse. Not understanding plagiarism (go look up the dictionary, or Wikipedia already!) whilst being an edito of a publication just makes this bad thing horrendous.

Make a full apology. Don't do it again.

Post reply on HN