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Topic: Do you think some plagiarism can happen "by mistake"? - page 3. (Read 693 times)

copper member
Activity: 2856
Merit: 3071
https://bit.ly/387FXHi lightning theory
Saying "sort of by mistake" kinda sounds like "just did it a few times and hoped not to get caught". I mean I could be wrong but how do you manage to accidentally plagiarise - especially on a different thread (I could guess on the same thread someone could quote someone and edit the quotes so it looks like their word but would probably be just fixed anyway by them or a mod).
legendary
Activity: 2170
Merit: 3858
Is plagiarism always intentional or can there be some specific cases in which it is not? It is not clear to me.
Possibly.

  • It's why plagiarism report will be handled case-by-case and very careful by moderators.
  • Moderators won't carelessly use their ban hammers immediately after they receive a plagiarism report. They will look at proof of plagiarism and post history.
  • It will be handled by moderators and escalate to global moderators or admins. With the complicated escalation process, I don't think reports will be handled inaccurately.

Plagiarism is what gets people permabanned, not just copying. Plagiarism is copying with the intent of passing the work off as your own. In essentially all cases, plagiarism deserves a permaban because it usually proves definitively that the person is here for the wrong reasons: to fill up space in order to get paid, not to actually discuss or contribute. If someone was able to convince us that they were plagiarizing just to eg. impress people rather than to fill up space, then a lesser ban of a few months might instead be warranted. But this has never happened AFAICR. (Arguments based on plausible deniability aren't going to work; we don't need to prove that you had the motive we see in your actions.)

Posts are reported to moderators who check out the report. If the poster needs to be banned, the moderator sends a ban report up to a global mod or admin. The global mod or admin handles all of the ban reports they get at around the same time. Either the admins or global mods don't need to check every account because they trust the moderators to have already done so, or they check quickly because every such report contains references and links to the plagiarism post and to the source text so checking takes little time.
legendary
Activity: 1232
Merit: 1888
I'm not talking about someone who copy-pasted without quoting the source in a dozen posts or more. Maybe someone who has only one case of plagiarism in all his post history and has written like 5k posts.

The question came to my mind because of the latest reported case of plagiarism. Mpamaegbu and Pokapoka124 were recently accepted into the Best Change sig campaign, which, AFAIK, is the second best-paying campaign on the forum. Then:

when a user is accepted into one of the better-paid campaigns, necessarily goes under the microscope. all posts are checked backwards, it didn’t get around either Mpamaegbu and Pokapoka124.
Just receive PM about the potential it looks like it is plagiarism by these two users.
Here:
Mpamaegbu
Pokapoka124

Only Mpamaegbu has replied so far, saying that it was kind of "by mistake", but I don't want to discuss those individual cases here, because I think there will be discussed in the plagiarism and/or sig campaign threads.

The question is whether we can believe that any plagiarism happens by accident. I have been searching and have not found any posts that are exactly on this topic, although I have found two interesting but somewhat opposite opinions in posts on plagiarism:

... people don't plagiarize by mistake, it is always intentional.

Sort of "accidental" plagiarism should be really uncommon; especially if the statement was something really really common.

For example: "A hardware wallet is the best option for holding your cryptocurrencies long-term". While I literally just wrote that myself right now with no intent of copying anyone, I wouldn't be surprised if the same exact line was posted at least once in the past on some article or forum post. Obviously this shouldn't be bannable simply because it's very common information.

What do you think? Is plagiarism always intentional or can there be some specific cases in which it is not? It is not clear to me.
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