Topic: Merit Source - Plagiarist - page 4. (Read 5336 times)

It has been pointed out before that he is plagiarizing, and he has continued to plagiarize, so I am not holding my breath that he has learned anything.

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Knowledgeable? Ha! Can you link to a single knowledgeable post he has made which is original and not a copy paste of someone else's work?

Feel annoying? You mean like having whole boards filled up with dozens of useless spam threads filled with useless statistics no one cares about? You and Ratimov aren't that different; not a single original thought between you.

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You both say that you are impressed by him? Impressed by what exactly? His ability to copy and paste? His posts could be made by a bot, and a very simple one at that.

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This is a good summary. Add posting endless lists of stats to your list of things that require zero knowledge but for some reason keep getting awarded with merits.

My bad. I thought he is a moderator.

Anyway, can I do what he does? Like finding a non-english article about something related to cryptocurrency then translate it to english, cite source, and wait for the merits to come? He also gets paid high from doing this so it's probably the best thing to do here in the forum without worrying about plagiarism.

Why is witcher_sense defending Ratimov hereby?


Perhaps Ratimov can provide us with a translation of that!  Of course, he will need to use Google Translate, because:


witcher_sense now loves Google Translate so much, he thinks that it’s fine to spam the English section with Google translations of plagiarised Russian articles? 

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Good thread.  I recommend that everybody following this case should read it, using Google Translate if necessary.


Whereas Ratimov seems not to be even capable of doing translations.  He is only using Google Translate, and posting the results.  —At least, that is what he now claims, in substantial effect.  Anyone who claims that he cannot write in English without Google-translating his own words from Russian, and effectually claims not even to know the meaning of the pronoun “I”, obviously cannot make any translations involving the English language—not to English, and not from English!  Right?


For my part, I have always had the highest respect for people from Russia, Ukraine, and other Eastern bloc regions.  It is a shame when a few bad apples make the whole barrel smell rotten to some Westerners with limited viewpoints.


I have spoken privately to users here who are from countries so poor, they have family members who make the equivalent of about USD 30 $ per month at full-time jobs.  (No joke.  Real “third world” places.)  For them, even a low-end bounty or signature campaign means significant money.  The users to whom I spoke did the best that they could honestly:  No cheating, no spamming, no shitposting—just wearing a paid signature while trying to improve their knowledge of Bitcoin, and otherwise to engage with the forum community.

They had to compete against the flood of spammers who would do anything for a merit; and they risked false accusations of cheating in campaigns, simply due to being from very problematic regions.  They found that to be quite discouraging.

Yes, true stories.  Blended together with some insubstantive details changed, to protect the privacy of people who confided in me.

Hereby, we have the same problem:  A generalized version of Gresham’s Law.  The bad displaces the good.  The result is a state of affairs in which the honest, the truthful ones, are considered the more stupid.  It would end in the belief that it is better to have a share in the wrongdoing, than to stand by with empty hands or allow oneself to be wronged.

As I indicated earlier in this thread, I take as a personal affront when, after all of the time and effort I have invested in making original high-quality posts that people merited, I see Ratimov making a forum career of huge copy-paste OPs.  Why the hell did I ever waste my time with this forum!?

Or:  🤔 Why don’t I do the same thing?  Surely, if I were to make a habit of that, I would soon reach my 3000th merit!

—And why don’t I get paid for it?  🤑  It is by now a sort of an open secret here that I am poor.  Isn’t that an unlimited justification, plus a mark of sainthood? 

—And why not others?  Why doesn’t johnnyUA do the same as Ratimov?  Why doesn’t everybody?

Surely, that would make the forum a successful community; and it would do much to advance Bitcoin.

I said the same as yours.

Ratimov indeed made lots of huge threads and he is knowledgeable and spent decent efforts and time to compiled those huge topics. With topics he simply shared, he is knowlegeable and selective to do so and I admired him for his selection process.

I can learn from myself too. Don't do anything too much and too often, then people will don't feel values of what you are doing. Sometimes, it can cause side-effects, they feel annoying. Sometimes, they are jealous and many other reasons.

Some notes

• Learn (first): and I much appreciated all people helped and partially built up my adventure here. I spent my time definitely but you all have your contributions indirectly.
• Share: share things selectively and reduce the intensity. Some people who are unable to do what they do will feel uncomfortable with your achievements.
• Abuse: yes it is. Low quality members will look at reputable users and their works (mostly they pay attention on merits) and repeat with same styles. The more people do it, the more potential troubles you can get (as initiator).

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I am impressed with Ratimov works BUT such the drama raises the need to revise the rule on plagiarsim and guide how to share documents better.

If you're referring to Ratimov, he's not a moderator. He's just in the ChipMixer campaign which means he is receiving extra scrutiny.

I think Ratimov has learned what to do going forward after all this in order to avoid these types of threads being made about him in the future.

@Ratimov: You do a lot of good work but its actually too much! Just be yourself and don't try to impress everyone so hard going forward. Trust me, we're already impressed.

How ironic and funny this situation is. A "MODERATOR" is a plagiarist? I can't believe what is happening right now. It's clear that it's not your standard plagiarism due to the fact that he cited the source BUT that doesn't mean it's not plagiarism. It's more a like a more complicated form of plagiarism. Anyone who wasn't aware would be fooled immediately but someone who knows will actually see it.

Quote a fun thread to read. I hope this thread be a catalyst to address this kind of plagiarism.

I don't want to read the whole thread and this should be left to mods, but it would be better to tell why this happened. At first, all people with registration date after 2017 are very suspicious to me, especially russians (i know at least one big russian forum,  MMPG where bitcointalk bounties were advertised as "easy money", with all related consequences).

This is sad, not because people from post USSR so bad, rather it's hard to think about anything except money if your salary is around 200 dollars (I see such "philosophy" every day around me).

So average noob came here without being interested in crypto as a technology, hence he don't know (and don't want to learn) anything valuable about crypto. What he's able to do?

- "fight scams"
- "translate (mostly) useless shit which in any way belongs to the subject"
Sometimes, not often, write a useless (mostly) guides which very often it's just a rewriting of older guides, or the same guides (in terms of meaning) but from other sources. We in our russian local board already have a lot of guides about sending transaction offline, how much priv keys bitcoin has and so on. Sometimes i find myself with feeling that I'm in fucking "Groundhog Day".

The proof why such things is being doing for some personal "karma" scores (hey hey, look how many fine translations and guides i have in my portfolio) rather than for community, is the fact that nothing forbids people to add new info to already existing guides. But in that case of course you can't use your message as a proof of how you're cool.

The proof is for example the topic where old russian local members (some of them with 2013 reg date) complain about such "translations".


And this is not a problem of Ratimov or someone other, i doubt that they are evil genius, rather they're doing the things which is have a better KPI. For example, Ratimov is not bad trader, but here, after he found that his trading strategies didn't interested anyone, he turned into a "scam fighter, forum cleanser, and translator". Just because you merit useless translations, not trading.
And this is was just a matter of time when someone will finally make an error in translation or something like that just to get more coins from his sig.

So you want to say that  you couldnt write sentence In this article I would like to touch upon such a theme as online privacy. by yourself in english and you had to write in russian first and then translate ?
If that is the case you shouldnt even write in english board,if you cant write simple sentence without google translate.Otherwise anyone can use google translate to write in other boards as much as they want.

Bullshit.

Crap, you were posting to English boards. Linguists said both Russian phrases allude they are in the first person. Apart of being plagiary you are DT abuser who deliberately sent  me a neg  for your own advantage  after  I showed up  plagiarism in your posts https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.55189575 ,


however it's the job of DT to ~ him for trust abusing.

Regardless of how some “people” defend the indefensible, I doubt that a reputable signature campaign manager will want to waste his client’s money paying a plagiarist to spam the forum with Google translations of articles written by others. 


Ratimov is misdirecting with an attempt to divert an English-speaking audience into a debate over the finer points of Russian grammar, by exploiting a loophole in Google’s low-quality, error-ridden automated translation.

Ironically, he thereby implicitly admits that his Google-translated shitposts are inaccurate, “zero or low value, pointless or uninteresting posts or threads” that violate Rule #1.  Anyway, let’s cut the nonsense.

Ratimov claims to provide translations.  Only an outright scammer would make a name for himself by providing translations to a target language in which he lacks even the most basic facility.  As an English speaker myself, I think that the English-speaking audience will agree with me that if Ratimov did not notice the meaning and implication of the first-person pronoun “I” in the very first sentence of his post—in one of only two sentences that he himself wrote in the post, then he should not even be engaging regularly in English-language discussions—let alone offering any translations to English!

Whereupon:

• For someone who not only posts regularly in the English forum, but offers translations to English, it is incredible for him to allege that he just didn’t realize that the sentence he prepended to a copy-paste used the word “I” in a way that claims ownership of the article.  It is an excuse tantamount to, “The dog ate my homework.”  By far, the most probable explanation is that he is lying and making up a cover story, now that he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
• The evidence in that initial, added sentence, “In this article I would like to touch upon...” dovetails with the evidence that he (a) he provided no byline naming the author of the article, and (b) he deceitfully buried the link to the original in tiny text, amidst an anonymous, unexplained, misrepresented list of links at the bottom.
  
  If he had honestly represented the authorship of the post by naming the author prominently at the top (or even at all), then it may be arguably just a little bit plausible that he got confused with a contradictory English preface.  Not so, when each and every indicium of authorship is that Ratimov wrote the post.

We need not reach the questions (plural) of whether he really used Google Translate to create that sentence, and if so, what he really typed into it:  The questions are nugatory, whereas anyone who is regularly active in the English forum could damn well see what the output meant.

For the record:  I would not apply the same argument to someone who exclusively, or almost exclusively posted in a Local forum.  But then, such a person would not be spamming the English-language forums with Google translations of articles written by other people; thus, the question would not arise.

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That does not only strain credulity:  It shatters it into a thousand pieces, stomps on it, then douses it with petrol and lights it ablaze.

Credulity is well and truly dead here.  (Unless you also seriously believe that confirmed science proves that you should short Bitcoin at high leverage.)

Furthermore, certainty beyond a reasonable doubt is not hereby the proper standard of evidence.  I argue that these forum issues should be judged on the preponderance of the evidence.  (That said, the doubt about the intent of mashing an unlabelled source link into a tiny list of links is unreasonable doubt.)

At this juncture, I should also point out that as I was unaware when I entered this thread, Ratimov has previously had plagiarism accusations for copied-pasted posts with “source” links at the end.  For example:

Re: Report plagiarism (copy/paste) here. Mods: please give temp or permban as needed

The referenced post:

Note:  The “source” link thereby is in normal-sized text.  The post is still at best improperly attributed; and if done not in ignorance of the issue, it is plagiarism.

Overall, the weight of the evidence is that Ratimov hides the foreign-language “source” link to evade the accusations that are brought when people can actually find the “source”.

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The following is only Meta issue insofar as it shows that Ratimov is acting in bad faith from start to finish.  If he abuses his current DT1 status in a pitiable attempt to intimidate and retaliate against me, it goes to character; and it tends to demonstrate that he is lying about his intentions with his plagiarized post.

It is otherwise a Reputation issue; but it is too stupid for me to feel like bothering with a Reputation thread over it right now.  Retaliation for negative trust feedback that will be of business/trade-risk interest to signature campaign managers who don’t want to be cheated into paying for Google-translated plagiarism?  LOL.  Srsly?



Well, there I go again, using my “main account” to stand up for right over wrong. 

So I'll come out in a neutral position to express my opinion, especially since I've merited the accused topic. I'm a non-native English speaker, so I have to often confront translation issues myself. Thought it would be nice to give an answer to this thread.

To answer your first question, I honestly never contemplated whether it was Ratimov who wrote the introduction or it was taken from one of the sources mentioned below. To be fair, the fact that the thread starts with "In this article I would like to touch upon" does make it seem like Ratimov was the one to write and compile the topic from zero but I, at least personally, do not necessarily feel offended by it.

Now for the second question of yours, I have mixed feelings. If Ratimov wanted to hide the fact that the original article was not written by him, he could've used his own words and do a complete translation and rewrite of the text. And had he done that, we all would've accused him for text spinning and plagiarism. Would you feel less "cheated" on by Ratimov if the translation wasn't a "lazy" one but a complete rewrite of the original article instead?

Having seen a lot of threads throughout my BTCTalk experience, I thought Ratimov's thread deserved a merit especially since it's well organized and the information he's provided is interesting, not that easy to discover and different to what you usually see around here. I often see threads that are either completely uninteresting or have a very bad layout. I often struggle organizing my own threads and find myself not being able to make it pleasant to the eye even after hours of editing, so I always appreciate well-written posts.

I also know what it takes to write a thread well enough to be appreciated by others over here. From what I've seen, most of the CM participants have a long history of high quality posts and so I don't really feel like checking their posts for plagiarism. And while I do kinda feel like he's "cheated" since I spend hours and hours on a post written from zero to earn the same/less merit than Ratimov does for a copied one, I do not consider I have the right to complain in this situation since I have not bothered to check the sources beforehand (and even if I did, the key source is in an unknown language to me anyway).

As far as I've seen, copied posts are allowed on the forum as soon as you mention the sources in the footer. Ratimov's threads do have the sources mentioned, so I think having an issue about Ratimov not mentioning the author's name is a bit far-fetched since I don't think I've seen someone else do that when quoting/copying information from a source.

But on the other hand, I don't agree with Ratimov's POV either ("Chipmixer pays for 50 posts, that is, I write about 20 posts for free"). While the maximum amount of paid posts is 50 and you exceed it by 20 more, you cannot ignore that a part of your recent merit comes from these "free" posts that you copy from other websites when you know that the high amount of appreciation is one of the probable reasons DS accepted you (and is still keeping you) in the campaign he manages.

As I said, I am neutral in this situation though. I do not feel like being necessarily cheated for giving the merit, and if that thread does not deserve it then I'm sure there are many others written by Ratimov which do - so if that's the case, then take it as if I have given him a merit for all his work on the forum so far. I take it as plagiarism when there's no source mentioned - and Ratimov did mention the exact sources, which should go in tandem with the forum rules. The fact that the official definition of plagiarism does not fit the forum's is a different thing.

Hopefully my reply comes in as a helpful one for the accusation - and, hopefully, no hard feelings to whoever reads this.

I could, though.

For instance, by not posting any sources. His post is more than just the first phrase. The fact that the link is there among other links, or the fact that other people have thought this post was original (therefore Merited it), are not relevant. The link is there completely in the open (maybe surrounded by other links, but it's there), which is probably enough to at least create enough "reasonable" doubt about the good or bad intentions of the poster. At least, that's what I think, but we are not the judges in here, the mods are and it's up to them to decide.

That being said, I do think you're playing with fire, Ratimov. You're a respected, high-Merited member of this forum, but your "I would like to" phrase would probably not have passed the jury, had you been a low-ranked newbie shitposter.

Also, you shouldn't set every advice in this thread aside as if they were only negative comments from "clowntrolls". There's enough signs that enough people have been misled about the way you formulated your opening phrase and the style of your article. If that happens once, it's not your fault. But if you'd continue to post articles in the same way, without taking into account some of these warnings above, it could raise questions about your intentions after all.

My two cents, and just a friendly suggestion to formulate your stuff more carefully.

Peace.

I have assembled a few quotes from theymos. Bold added by me throughout. Italics present in originals.



I cannot think of how one could show the "intent of passing work off as one's own" any more than an opening sentence like this.

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The path forward is decided then. Submitting a Google translated article in its entirety, even with a link at the bottom, would get you expelled from a university, no questions asked.

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This is eye opening. Thinking that 90% of content here is plagiarized speaks volumes to his character, is at odds with the purpose of the forum, and is a truly pathetic excuse.

Why not?  It is a clear-cut textbook example of definitional plagiarism.

I think it mostly fits the description of “Source-based Plagiarism” in the Turnitin.com Plagiarism Spectrum 2.0 (infographic PDF), though what Ratimov did is worse insofar as he clearly made himself appear to be the original author of the text.  Really, what Ratimov did is just old-fashioned plagiarism with some duplicitous double-talk about “sources”.


I don’t think that everything on that spectrum is applicable outside academia—in particular, “self-plagiarism”.  If e.g. a forum member were habitually to copy and paste his own articles into the forum from his own website, then it would not be “plagiarism” in any meaningful sense here; but it may be spamming, which is also against the rules.  Anyway, some of the concepts on that infographic are certainly useful in this discussion.

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FTFY:

There are many ways to make it clear what the source is:


Some dude said: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. -- some dude

However this:

I think that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.




























































Some of the above text may have been copied from some dude.

... is misleading even though it's not a bannable offence. Why do this when you can do it properly without making anyone guess what is copypasta and what isn't? I can understand newbies fumbling with quotes but more experienced posters should know better.

Why at the end?  That is inverted thinking, especially because the forum’s format gives a byline for the author of every post:  The poster’s username.  That is up top.

In general (ignoring weird edge cases), the only acceptable way properly to give credit for lengthy copied material is to present the actual author’s name (and, if applicable, the source hyperlink) on a byline prominently displayed at the top of the copied material.  Cf. the forum’s block format, which attributes a quotation at the top thereof.

Anything else here is either improper attribution, or plagiarism, depending on whether the person doing it has made a good-faith effort to cite the source.  Last month, I quoted an academic writing resource’s explanation of the difference.  Somebody who appears to have tried to cite the source, and made a mistake, deserves guidance (if appropriate, via a polite PM).  Somebody who prefaces the copied material with text unavoidably implying authorship thereof, and buries a source link in a tiny-text list of links at the bottom, has clearly committed plagiarism.

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Quote from: nutildah on December 08, 2020, 06:33:11 PM

This is the only definition of plagiarism that matters:

Quote from: theymos on September 23, 2018, 03:58:25 PM

Common rule violations

These are the most common rule violations that newbies make. There are other rules than these.

• Plagiarism: If you copy some text from somewhere, then you should have a good reason for it, and you must link to the source. Doing otherwise is plagiarism. Changing a few words around doesn't matter. If we find that you plagiarized, then you absolutely will be permanently banned, even if we find it years after you did it.

Copied text from somewhere: check.
Has a good reason for it: check.
Link to the source: check.

Ergo, Ratimov did not commit plagiarism as defined by the admin of the forum. Any case to be made that Ratimov should still be punished should be based on evidence that other users have been banned for plagiarism even after including the source, which AFAIK has never happened.

nutildah’s illogical hairsplitting and rules-lawyering over a mechanistic parsing of a quote demonstrates empirically that using LSD can permanently compromise one’s powers of judgment and reasoning.  PSA:  It is an irreparably damaging “experience” that young people should avoid!

Pro tip nutildah:  Twisting theymos’ words to cover burying a tiny “source” link in the middle of a misrepresented list of “source” links, at the very bottom of a copied-pasted post that (a) did not name the original author, (b) dishonestly claimed Ratimov’s authorship (“In this article I...”), shows only that you yourself are mentally deranged and/or malicious and dishonest.  All of the above, I think.

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Quote from: ?? on ??

Quote from: nullius on December 08, 2020, 03:04:03 AM

Going by your own standards, Lauda should have been banned for plagiarism.

Quote from: nutildah on December 08, 2020, 06:33:11 PM

Lauda and cryptohunter, on the other hand, both committed plagiarism according to these standards. It's pretty clear if you are able to set emotional judgment aside.

nutildah, your obsessive, unjustified cryptohunter-style attack on Lauda is also quite revealing.  CH, it is such a nice secret fan club you have here!  Now, watch me pick them apart.

• What Lauda did was orders of magnitude less-bad in scope and in level of dishonesty than Ratimov’s plagiarism.  nutildah perversely inverts the truth in comparing the two.  Lauda never intentionally ripped off whole posts from foreign language articles, laundered them through an automated translator, and then posted them as new topic OPs prefaced by a line dishonestly claiming authorship (“In this article I would like to touch upon...”).
• If Lauda had done that, and/or if Lauda had reacted to the plagiarism accusation the same way as Ratimov has, then I would have eaten kitty-chops, extra rare, with a nice Chianti.
  
  
  Quote from: nullius on May 22, 2020, 07:58:54 PM
  I was about ready to dine on feline fillet; and I grilled Lauda about this in private.
  Quote from: nullius on November 22, 2020, 08:03:10 PM
  
  A bank’s KYC/AML compliance officer once tried to test me.  I was critical of his discourteous intrusion.
  
  She did not, because she was an honest person.  Nobody is perfect.  At the baseline, honest people who are caught in some past wrongdoing (usually due to sincere mistakes) do not attack the accuser, declare that wrongdoing is right in principle, and remorselessly insist that they will keep doing wrong.
  
  
  Quote from: Lauda on May 21, 2020, 06:55:42 AM
  Quote from: bitcoinchan on May 20, 2020, 03:25:18 PM

  Username: Lauda
  Profile link: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/lauda-101872
  

  Thank you for reporting these.
  
  In the circumstance, Lauda did the best to make right that she could do without a time machine.  In private, that was also the first time that, among other things, I heard her mention the idea of requesting a self-ban—in the manner of kitty seppuku.  I had to talk her out of it.  For obvious reasons, I did not want to disclose that publicly at the time when all of Lauda’s enemies were demanding that she be banned.
  
  
  🌸🌸🌸🀥🌸🌸🌸
  the way of the warrior
  if your friend self-eviscerates
  beheading is friendship
  
  Base image source: The Gist of Japan: The Islands, Their People, And Missions, Rev. R. B. Peery, A.M., Ph.D. (1897), p. 85,
  via Wikimedia Commons.
  
  I don’t think that that had anything to do with what happened in October.  Her activity did drop off a cliff after May; but from my view of the situation, I think that it was probably a coincidence—probably.  Anyway, nutildah and cryptohunter can now both celebrate together that “the banned plagiarist Lauda” is gone!
• If Lauda had done anything like this anytime recently, I would have seen it differently.  Ratimov is committing extreme plagiarism much worse than anything that Lauda ever did, and he is doing it right now.

That is reality.  If you don’t like it, o nutty nutildah, take another hit of acid to make it go away. 

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P.S., protip for nutildah and suchmoon:  Pretending to ignore me renders you (even more) impotent as a debate opponent.  It also makes you look silly to the audience, when you reasonably need to respond to something that I said.  Awkward!  Please keep doing it.  Thanks.

This is the only definition of plagiarism that matters:


Copied text from somewhere: check.
Has a good reason for it: check.
Link to the source: check.

Ergo, Ratimov did not commit plagiarism as defined by the admin of the forum. Any case to be made that Ratimov should still be punished should be based on evidence that other users have been banned for plagiarism even after including the source, which AFAIK has never happened.

Lauda and cryptohunter, on the other hand, both committed plagiarism according to these standards. It's pretty clear if you are able to set emotional judgment aside.

The problem is that when you want to share an article you found on a website to interested people on bitcointalk, there doesn't exist a way to do it. The alternatives don't accomplish what you want.

1. If someone wants to share an article and posts this:

Most of the people who you want to read it won't, because they are apprehensive of clicking unknown links.

2. There is no "Share" button on bitcointalk where you can send an article you read to a new thread for others to read (such a feature would be heavily abused too).

So I think the best solution is, to include the sentence "I am not the source, this information came from the following articles:" at the end, before the list of links. Even though it is generally accepted that including links to articles you derived information from is a form of attribution (and attribution absolves you from claims of plagiarism), it looks like some people overlook this, and want to see a more prominent form of attribution.

Internal quotation fixed so as to make mdayonliner’s meaning clear:

It is not irrelevant.  As I myself said before mdayonliner raised this issue, in the internal quotation:

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Now, don’t you feel cheated that you sent merit to Ratimov for a rip-off Google Translate copy of another author’s work?

By the way, I know that there are people here, including myself, who do draft original content on this forum—including in “laying out historical information”.  Ratimov’s plagiarism cheapens their (our) work.

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Definitional plagiarism is plagiarism.


Nonsense.  A buried, unlabelled reference at the bottom of a long post which begins with an explicit claim of this being Ratimov’s article—say what!?


Wrong.  With “this degree of non-original wording” in an academic thesis (!), i.e. all but the first two sentences (!!), the plagiarist would be expelled from university and permanently blacklisted from admissions.  Furthermore, any degrees previously awarded may be retroactively stripped, depending on the circumstance.

Since I’m quoted here for meriting (albeit this being an irrelevant fact) the thread being deconstructed, I’ll provide my input as to what I saw when reading through the referenced thread.

What I saw was an elaborate thread, that contained interesting information, far from the usual type of content, and that was appealing to read. I’ve already merited @Ratimov multiple times, so there was no need to vet the content like I often do with first-timers. By vet, I mean see if there was a reference to the source, and determine whether the content surpassed the copy/paste that many newly created accounts resort to (without link -> plagiarism; with link -> unsubstantial post in general).

I did enjoy the read, and the structure looked like the typical layout of a posting author’s compiled and worded set of comments, with embedded verbatim quotes. I therefore did assume, as I’d generally do on mentally vetted profiles, that the non-quoted parts of the post were indeed essentially @Ratimov’s wording, not original content, since drafting original content when laying out historical information is not that common.

I do recall seeing the reference to the sources, and clicking on the first two. Having no wish for further readings on the topic at the time, and being thrown back by the (understandable) format of the first two sources (*), I scrolled back to the top, pressed the Merit button, and went for my puffed-up hyper generous procedure of awarding 2 sMerits (as opposed to my mean 1 sMerit usual).

Now is this plagiarism?
It depends on the prism we are using. From the perspective of the forum, the reference/s are there, so it complies with what is ordinarily common law around here, and cannot be deemed as Bitcointalk rule-type interpreted tradition plagiarism, as (unofficial) rules stand. From an academic point of view, any thesis with this degree of non-original wording would be pointed out, and the author would by all means fail his thesis.

When are we going to have a original wording indicator (percentage) for each post?
I would certainly take it into heavy consideration when meriting, but I guess this question surpasses the meriting factor.

(*) The third source is of course the key, but being in Russian, I would probably not have really looked at it upon reflecting on the fact, thus missing the visually similar layout, which, dealing with a vetted profile, I would probably not have looked into.