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

Is Plagiarism Wrong?

thepointmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 62 posts

Re: Is Plagiarism Wrong?

#41

Post by jccalhoun »

I teach college and often public speaking. Practically all college students know that wholesale plagiarism is wrong but many of them still don't know how to cite their sources.

I tell them any time you use information from another source you need to say the source even if you use the same source 2-3 sentences in a row. Every time I hear you give a statistic I ask myself, "Did you give a source for that?" We do exercises where I give them paragraphs without citations and ask them to identify all the ones that need citations. I have them do impromptu speeches on summarizing an article and citing it multiple times. I explain the difference between a source and a citation. I tell them I don't care about a works cited slide. If I don't hear them say the source it doesn't count.

Many of them still give statistics without citing them.

Re: Is Plagiarism Wrong?

#42

Post by abnry »

comboy wrote: post #34
MereInterest wrote: post #19

Yes, plagiarism is wrong. The author starts by telling how he, as a child, confused the directions of "write a poem" and "write down a poem". He then doubles down on this mistake, rather than concluding that English is weird. The author conflates legality and morality, stating that any group that establishes extralegal moral norms needs to reexamine its assumptions. The author implicitly and incorrectly assumes that…

I'm too lazy to read the article (hey at least I'm honest), but I think you can have a working science/news with plagiarism. In our western culture everything is egocentric. You work hard to be remembered for milenia for wonderful things that you've done. We try to mention who first observed or invented something (even though it often happens in multiple places at once and only the most popular and best marketed pers…

I am not convinced reputation would work the same way, or that plagiarism isn't bad, but I definitely agree with the ego-centrism in the modern scientific world. I personally think it is a moral hazard and is something that discourages and robs the enjoyment of many people in the field. It is better to focus on the beauty of the ideas than the "beauty" of the reputation of the one who proposed the ideas.

Re: Is Plagiarism Wrong?

#43

Post by celeritascelery »

sentdex wrote: post #38

The plagiarism that I personally see is specifically code plagiarism. I am a programming educator on youtube.com/sentdex and pythonprogramming.net Lately, I have been digging into this, and it's far more rampant than I ever expected (I am still digging, but we're talking in the 10's of thousands of examples that I've found with basic automated searching just in matches to my own personal code). I have found some seri…

It’s hard to draw the line though. Is using stack overflow’s answers wrong? What about getting an algorithm from a text book? Obviously lifting an entire course is wrong. But nothing is created in a vacuum. Especially code, which feels more like math then English.

Re: Is Plagiarism Wrong?

#44

Post by robbrown451 »

I can understand a 6 year old being confused. They (maybe) aren't old enough to grasp that actually composing something like a poem is the hard part. At that age, memorizing and writing it down can seem like an impressive feat all by itself, possibly even more impressive than the composing part. All the more true for a kid under the circumstances described (challenges with English due to immigrating, etc).

With an adult, though...I'd think they'd understand the concept of taking credit for someone else's work being not ok.

I'm not fan of the way intellectual property law works (in particular the way it is shoehorned into a free market system which only works efficiently on scarce goods with non-zero marginal cost, which IP is not), but still. This isn't really about intellectual property per se. It's still wrong to claim you came up with things for which the copyright is long expired or never existed. It is dishonest, and it is cheating.

This article presents an interesting childhood misunderstanding, and a misunderstanding by adults of how a child might think (I tend to think the teacher was rather cruel), and then spins it as if the child's point of view is sophisticated enough to be a valid adult view. But it obviously isn't.

Re: Is Plagiarism Wrong?

#45

Post by makapuf »

Lets copy this article under my domain name, attribute it to me and link to it on hackernews. Plagiarism withdraws many incentives to create (not only financial) and is therefore morally wrong. Copying memes is good since it allows confrontation and emergence of best memes. But you also need incentives to create, being money (sensible copyright) or fame (attibution)

Re: Is Plagiarism Wrong?

#46

Post by abnry »

goto11 wrote: post #24
mjw1007 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the problem here is that universities have repurposed the word "plagiarism" to include forms of cheating which it doesn't naturally cover. For example, if a student pays someone else to write an essay, nowadays that gets classified as plagiarism. But it's hard to see it as a theft of ideas, any more than it's theft if I buy something from a shop.

Plagiarism is to misrepresent something as authored by yourself. Whether you paid someone else for writing it or copied it without permission does not matter for the plagiarism charge - the wrongdoing is the misrepresentation. It is not the same as copyright infringement - although it might be both at the same time if you copy something without permission and publish it under your own name. Plagiarism is not always i…

One of the issues that makes this murkier is that it is often only social norms and expectations that determine whether someone is misrepresenting themselves. In the meme world, the whole purpose is to share and modify slightly. There isn't an expectation that your post is original. In the academic world, every single word is assumed to be original unless cited otherwise. There are areas in between these cases, and often what someone calls a violation is merely the case of someone misreading the social norms.

Re: Is Plagiarism Wrong?

#47

Post by Sinergy2 »

kiba wrote: post #39
capableweb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you bring up good points. I think the only difference between Open Source and Proprietary software is that one you're allowed to plagiarize, and the other you're not. In the end, Open Source wins as it automatically gets way more exposure and users, as anyone can access, copy, modify and freely share it forever.

I am sorry, what? Open source software license does not generally allow such thing.

The GPL variants, for example, require you to allow others to plagiarize your work.

Re: Is Plagiarism Wrong?

#48

Post by abnry »

mjw1007 wrote: post #25
MereInterest wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more than just two parties to plagiarism. In the example given, the student buying an essay has not wronged the student who wrote the essay, anymore than a politician has wronged their speechwriter. However, when they turn in that essay for credit in a class, they have wronged the university by fraudulently representing it as theirs. The cost of the degree is in work that they have personally completed, not…

Certainly the student has wronged the university, but to my mind it's the same kind of wrong as if they'd smuggled a calculator in to an arithmetic test. That also lets the student gain a reputation they didn't deserve. I would prefer to reserve "plagiarism" for the case where the true originator of the ideas is potentially being eclipsed. (Incidentally, according to my local university's academic misconduct policy,…

Would it be better to deprecate the world plagiarism and fork it into the words cheating and reputation stealing? To me, that would ultimately be more accurate, because it better encapsulates the harm involved.

Re: Is Plagiarism Wrong?

#49

Post by kiba »

Sinergy2 wrote: post #47
kiba wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sorry, what? Open source software license does not generally allow such thing.

The GPL variants, for example, require you to allow others to plagiarize your work.

No. As far as I know, it doesn't.

Re: Is Plagiarism Wrong?

#50

Post by sentdex »

celeritascelery wrote: post #43
sentdex wrote: post #38

The plagiarism that I personally see is specifically code plagiarism. I am a programming educator on youtube.com/sentdex and pythonprogramming.net Lately, I have been digging into this, and it's far more rampant than I ever expected (I am still digging, but we're talking in the 10's of thousands of examples that I've found with basic automated searching just in matches to my own personal code). I have found some seri…

It’s hard to draw the line though. Is using stack overflow’s answers wrong? What about getting an algorithm from a text book? Obviously lifting an entire course is wrong. But nothing is created in a vacuum. Especially code, which feels more like math then English.

When you take an algorithm from a book, or copy and paste from stack overflow, you put a comment in the code with a link to the source, really no different than how you'd cite a quote in a paper.

To me, it just doesn't seem like it's even remotely challenging to figure out how to do this, or when to do this. If it's not yours, say where you got it.

When in doubt, cite it. What exactly would the harm be if you cited something when you weren't sure if it was necessary, anyway?

Post reply on HN