Topic: Plagiarism as a result of cultural differences (Read 1271 times)

There are many solutions, I guess it will affect some of the rights, they do not welcome this kind of improvement.

There are always more solutions than difficulties. Bitcoin is derived from consensus. In fact, it is completely based on the trust in the Bitcoin white paper and economic model, as well as the underlying technology of the blockchain, but in the Bitcoin forum, don't test humanity.

As long as you are a person, you have selfishness. Don't say how noble you are, I won't listen.

For decentralized Bitcoin, there is also a semi-centralized Bitcoin forum. It is not difficult to formulate the rules of the game, the key is whether it affects the interests of some people. I don't want to mention the name. I hate them.

Ratimov once said that this forum only has 10% original content, including himself of course. The others are all quotes. This is not a small probability event, especially the quotes of some pictures. If calculated based on plagiarism, then the forum will be closed directly.

All the problems are only superficial. The essence is that because some people are more influential in the forum, they like the power in their hands, and they are not considering the problem from the perspective of the development of the forum. The forum’s freedom of speech is not real from time to time. I am not slandering their efforts, but I do not approve of their actions.

I think KingDen's idea is a pretty good one myself, and suchmoon suggested something very similar recently:


If either suggestion were implemented, newbies would have absolutely no excuse and no grounds for appeal if they posted someone else's words without crediting them.  And given that the problem is extensive and has been going on for so long and that it would probably be an easy thing to do, why not do it?  Seriously, how much coding would Theymos or whoever have to do to insert a warning like that?

Not sure why people absolutely need to continue to keep this discussion alive. The definition of plagiarism does not change in other cultures or other forums. Its punishment does. Its definition doesn't.

Some of you are acting as if this plagiarism discussion is like a wine-tasting event, where everyone sips and swirls and feels the need to express his opinion. In reality, you're all drinking plain tap water.

"Posting something and pretending it's yours, is plagiarism. The rest is not." End of discussion.

And: "if you don't know the definition of plagiarism, then how can you tell your country (or culture? or other forums?) is flexible towards plagiarism?" ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

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I'm not going to write a new post about this every few months, so here's quoting myself:

I keep asking myself why such a warning still doesn't work? There is the red text: be careful with flag users, there is a warning about old themes. But there is no warning that plagiarism can negatively affect the future if the user commits it.

But if this has not yet been decided, then it is necessary to draw conclusions that the people who have come here should know about such violations? Isn't it? If you are interested in a forum, then interest comes from the person himself, why take something from others? By copying from other sources, the user understands that he is thus committing a deception. Therefore, the forum does not prohibit him from doing this, but simply informs him later that this is not acceptable on the forum. I see the forum here, as a living being, powerful enough, which can simply get rid of the swindler. No screams or warnings. This is power.

The lessons we learn make us stronger, not only in this forum but also in life. If we know that for each deception, its own portion of punishment will arrive, we simply will not do this everywhere.

We can't always wait on the forum to solve our problems, I remember when getting notification was an issue on the forum, some skillful forum members step up and such feature is no longer a problem and they're always update coming in making the notification more appealing, same thing could be done about the plagiarism issue we have in the forum. The society itself is already lost and the member coming in fail to realized that stealing someone else works is a crimes.

As I have previously said, this days the Social platform has made it a norm to plagiarized as they aren't tacking this issue, users can easily cite other users words/article as theirs written on Facebook and other platform without giving reference and they'll get away with such crime.

In summary, I think it'll be a welcome development if this skilled users that once solved our notification, signature ad and movable avatar problem before theymos set in can come to the rescue again and do something again like having a bot or something on the forum that automatically sends the unofficial rules highlighting the no plagiarism aspect to newly registered account, this might go a long way.

True. The rules of Bitcointalk are more important than what you know is applied in other forums or wherever you hang out. Users here are expected to adhere to Bitcointalk's local rules even though they are unofficial. If you come to my house, you take your shoes off. I don't care what you do at your place. Next time we go to your place, I will keep my shoes on if I have to or I simply won't come.

Many good ideas have been proposed already, including welcome messages of various forms, but nothing is happening on that front.

Plagiarism as a result of cultural differences is real and has been happening. I however wish to discuss as it concerns the forum;
1. Culture can generally be called ideas, norms, behaviors including rules and regulations guiding a particular people. If the above is correct, it will also be correct to say that bitcointalk has its own culture and/or cultural heritage and should not be overridden.
2. There can be indigenous and foreign cultures. In which ever way, as regards to plagiarism, the most important is awareness.
3. The duty of a new user to a forum is to read her rules and regulations before joining. Also the duty of the forum to the user is to make such rules and regulations more available to them.
4. If the unofficial rules are translated and pinned at every local boards it will be good.
5. MOST importantly, I have a proposal that to every newbie, there should be a warning "Do Not Copy/Paste other people’s work without Citing". This warning will remain at the top of the newbies page immediately after the menu bar. Maybe until the newbie will become a Jr member before it can be removed.
6. With this, the newbie mistake at first post or claiming not aware of plagiarism rule would be curtailed.
Thank you!

Bumping my old Plagiarism as a result of cultural differences thread due to the recent events.

If you want to apply a rule, you need proof that someone has broken it. With all due respect, surely this can't be the first time in your life that you realized an offence has to be proven??

That's exactly why mods are so careful before they ban someone for plagiarism.

If you need to know more, just search Google for "proof of intent", but this is turning into a (rather absurd) general legal discussion which has nothing to do with your OP and it's completely off-topic.

And the truth was spoken!!!

On here, most of the members are from countries where this cultural difference doesn't apply as an excuse. Even if people come from a country where plagiarism isn't a common spoken theme. The fact that they're on here means that they know something, or at least they know how to imitate that they know something, and by definition alone this means that they're at least aware of plagiarism. NO excuse!

For some bounty hunters this probably applies but for those who practice plagiarism, even their career as a bounty hunter wouldn't take them far. There will be no constructive comments or contributions, no new knowledge generated and in the end this is reflected in their merit.

There have been cases where users of higher ranks have been banned for plagiarism offences that they committed 3-4 years ago, and at a time when they were still new at the forum. I am not sure if the plagiarism rule even existed back then.

How do you determine the intent of why someone posted a photo. Lets say we are talking about the growth-rate of bitcoin in the last 3 months compared to lets say gold. And a user posts a graph that clearly shows how much bitcoin has gained compared to all precious metals.

He writes: take a look at this great graph that shows what gains bitcoin has achieved recently.
How can you determine and prove that he is claiming the photo is his or that he isn't?

A lot of interesting reactions, and a bit of nonsense and bullshit, too, here and there...

Copy-pasting and plagiarism are not synonyms.

I don't see why literally thousands of posts and opinions have been wasted on this subject. This is not something to have an opinion about: either it's plagiarism, or it's not.

That doesn't mean it's easy to prove (because if it's intentional, it's an offence, and if it's not intentional, it's not an offence) - and yes, the discussion about "intent" offers plenty of room for discussion - but the concept/definition of plagiarism is not open for discussion, not even in a cultural context. If you intentionally pretend the works or the text or the photo etc. to be yours - while they're not - there's plagiarism, no matter which country or culture you're in. So there are no different interpretations between cultures and nations, there are only differences between people who understand what (intentional) plagiarism is, and those who don't.

Read this a bit, because I don't know how clear it has to be made, before this discussion finally ends: https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/skills/plagiarism

So yes, posting a text or a photo which is not yours might cause copyright issues (which is using someone else's intellectual property without permission, but has nothing to do with the famous nr. 33 of the forum rules), but as long as you're not pretending it's yours, there's NO plagiarism offence.

And for instance, text spinning CLEARLY is an offence of plagiarism, because you're actively and intentionally working to pretend having written someone else's text, of which you're even trying to hide its traces - doesn't get more intentional than that, right?

Posting a photo without source, might have copyright consequences, but if you're not pretending the photo is yours, it's NOT a plagiarism offence.
Posting a text without source, exactly the same thing: might have copyright consequences, but if you're not pretending the photo is yours, it's NOT a plagiarism offence. There's no logical reason at all why photos and text posts would be treated in a different way?
It's not nice and quite stupid to not mark at least the source (not to mention the copyright discussion), but if there's no intent, it's NO plagiarism offence.

So imho, the only relevant discussion that should be had on "the big plagiarism debate" is reduced to this simple question: is it (proven) intentional or not?

By the way, in the plagiarism thread, I'm not saying there's an intent in every case, but in any case, all cases I've seen passing by on the thread were intentional. However I can imagine there's a probability that people have been banned in the past for copypasting something without pretending it to be their works. Not saying it happened, just saying it's probable. As this offence is punished with forum death penalty, I presume mods take in-depth look at every separate case before deciding to ban, temp or perm.

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edit:


QED

Copy and paste post then recognizes the source of the author below is also consider as plagiarism though source may be indicated and being acknowledge but in my own opinion it is not enough to republish without even asking first the author. Just like a book being scan or photcopied, the author has the copyright for this and we should respect the author of his intellectual property by responsible publishing may it be online or other platform like this forum. This is only my opinion.

Well it depends on the level/type of plagiarism. If someone asks a question like what is the colour teal and someone goes straight to google/wikipedia and posts Teal is a blue-green colour. Its name comes from that of a bird—the common teal (Anas crecca)—which presents a similarly colored stripe on its head. The word is often used colloquially to refer to shades of cyan in general. then I don't think they should be permanently banned for that. A warning would suffice for 99% of people to not do it again.


I'm not talking about specific cases but not everyone reads the rules or ventures into Meta. The rules should be made available upon sign-up. For many users they have little no reason to go here in Meta or it's often the last board they do. A welcome message stating a few of the most serious rules would help tremendously.

Warning is for newbies who don't read rules, don't know where to read rules or read but don't know the rule of plagiarism. With users are in the forum for a while and are Sr. Members, Hero members or Legendary members I don't agree they need warnings.

Roger it, naivety is for newbies not for Hero members 'bitcoinst' abusing signature campaign with alt account & spamming by copy-paste

People really should be given a warning about plagiarism as obviously not all plagiarism is equal. There's obviously a huge difference between someone who comes here and tries to milk signature campaigns or farm accounts by using someone else's postings either from this forum or elsewhere but if someone just posts an incorrectly quoted/sourced answer from google to a question someone asked then that really shouldn't be the end of their account. A warning or at the very most a short temp ban should be enough.
Obviously most of us know that plagiarism is wrong but sometimes it's just down to naivety more than anything and a lot of time won't be done with malicious intent with or without a signature. We also really need to get that welcome message sorted where users are urged to read the rules or are given a handful of the most important ones upon sign-up. That alone would stop a lot of this from ever happening.


It probably won't happen on this forum but hopefully it'll be on the new one. It would be a useful feature for sure.

I agree to it.

I think plagiarism should be divided into subcategories. And the punishment should be given proportional to it.

If a person copy pastes an article without source, let them be given a temporary ban or a stern warning and if they are caught doing that again, then ban. But if it's a deliberate plagiarism where a user plagiarized someone else's topic word by word to increase their post count then a permanent ban.

Also, if it's possible every newbie should be redirected to the rules post in which they click "I agree" before registering in which plagiarism rule be written in bold maybe

Although I would agree with the addition of some redirect/indicator for new users towards the forum rules, it is the infantilization of users' knowledge that creates the chain of excuses.

Consider:

What does someone have to go through in order to commit plagiarism in the English-speaking boards?
They need to comprehend English at a basic level to find content and they need to be able to match responses to questions or topics. It's probable that they are able to respond to the questions themselves, given appropriate knowledge on a particular topic. Perhaps they may not have encountered prejudice against plagiarism throughout their study of the language. If you are assuming some cultural difference or unawareness of the plagiarism rules, it's curious to wonder what kind of person expects to stay on a forum ban-free having never read the rules: did they expect that ignorance of the rules implied protection from them? And given that notion, could I assume the same position and thus present that as my cultural representation/perspective, thereby steering myself away from responsibility?

Regarding point number 3, I have been on both sides of the coin, where my school forced me to literally by-heart word by word, and present stuff. And another, where they asked us not to do so at all, and use referencing, citation when presenting papers.

I have used Turnitin before, I hate it because it fucks up your university life, but I also know that it is good. Turnitin has this feature, where you could view the originality of the paper, excluding the citations and references.

BUT the forum's plagiarism policy doesn't collide with the cultural differences at all.

The forum doesn't even ask for referencing, but rather only citations(links), if you copy something. The forum is so lenient towards plagiarism cause, you have to refer to stuff in real life situations when you use the ideas from others. People should know that plagiarism is an offence, its their mistake if they don't,in 99% of the cases. Cause most of us have gone to universities and referencing and plagiarism is a big deal there.

Referencing won't make sense for a forum, but I THANK GOD we don't have that shit. Referencing one website takes time and is annoying. SO I DO NOT MIND CITING STUFF. OTHERS SHOULDN'T TOO.

That means that I have to make a new post and ask a Mod to change it and every time we do a change I have bother the with the same request. I would prefer to have the right to change the initial post but the OP to still have control of if shows up one day.
I think the mods have better thins to do.

I just think that more emphasise can and should be put on the problem of copy/pasting since that is The Rule and reason why so many members get banned + it creates a lot of work for the moderators of the forum dealing with banned accounts.
Highlighting the problem of copy/pasting the way I suggested or adding a warning next to the "Post" and "Preview" buttons like o_e_l_e_o and some other members did would be a nice feature i think.

I can see that bingo card we used so often in the ban appeals thread getting 10 "it's in my culture" options.

All the text you refer there is not about plagiarizing two lines with eth going up or down but, and let me quote: "ideas that are beneficial to and shared by the community are not individually attributed, but rather recognized as universal knowledge"
None of the two line bs copy paste garbage we have here is even close to that stats.

Besides, I really don't like grouping countries together and saying Asia, just how I don't like people talking about eastern or central Europeans and throwing in all the countries like all are the same. And we all know most of the copy posters here are not Chinese or Japanese and one of the countries with its own fair share is not even in Asia.



Well, since on one hand, we have Confucianism how about we see the roman side of the story, Ignorantia juris non excusat  

Plagiarism is not a crime but it could lead to other things like copyright infringement. Being permanently banned without the person knowing that it’s not allowed is somewhat unacceptable to the person.

But still being a human, we should respect that we shouldn’t just copy other people’s stuff and post it as your own. But people just don’t acknowledge it, that’s where the problem comes. Not recognizing the author or the owner is subject to infringement.

The hardwork of a person no matter what it is, an article, an experiment, a scientific research, etc. You wouldn’t know what they have gone through to make that and not acknowledging it and just plain copying it is disheartening.

It’s not just cultural differences, it’s moral characteristic of a person on how they respect other people.

I'm glad that you brought that up, I was afraid of mentioning this as I might offend a lot of people but I'm from an Asian country and the university I went to has a really big punishment for plagiarism, we even had a seminar on plagiarism and proper citation before we started on doing our research paper. So this Turnitin article has bugged me a lot as it made it look like most Asian countries don't know what plagiarism is. I guess Turnitin doesn't even proofread and fact check their own articles anymore which is pretty hypocritical on their part.

I mean, even if your culture has no such thing as plagiarism, I would still think the old saying "When in Rome" would apply. When you want to get involved in a new community, it is wise to learn their customs before doing so.

However, given the vast number of "Why was I banned" threads that appear in Meta, and that >99% of them are because of plagiarism, I do think a red text warning below the "Post" and "Preview" buttons would be helpful.

Even the 'cultural' description on those students are wrong from my pov. I never remember we've been taught to not respect individual works or feels we should be uncomfortable when we cite someone on our papers. As collective as we are, individuals works are still respected ,even when we engage in online discussion.

One of the largest forum in my country, which is more 'carefree' than Bitcointalk still does not allow plagiarism. Even on Facebook, when some user posts a status that is similar to the status of somebody else, we 'bully' them. There is no cultural differences, we know plagiarism is bad.

A moderator should be able to update those posts.

I really respect the cultural differences each country have but is the 3rd group really the one hanging here in the forum? In all of your examples of cultural differences all of them are about students doing school work in each of their respective country, do you think the same understanding still applies in the forum where they just copy/paste posts just to complete a bounty requirement? I don't think so, I don't even think that the plagiarizers we have are students still studying in school in the first place. The best thing that this forum can do I guess is what you just have suggested which I doubt will really make a change at all to these kind of people.

@DdmrDdmr
I asked long ago about the possibility to have multiple owners of one thread, but I haven't heard since. We don't have a local section, only a thread in the other languages and the OP is a newbie with 2 posts and last active back in march 2012. I thought since this is our official thread, it could be changed an updated a if someone share the ownership with the OP.
It can be a solution in your case too.

That really looks like something that should be fixed.

From what I have seen, Theymos is usually way more receptive to specific viable solutions than unsolvable problems. For example, the way he handled the WO thread "issue" was absolutely perfect for everyone involved. And that was WAY more complex and even involved some considerable effort on his part and some minor changes to the forum.

So maybe if you or some of the other well standing members that are also involved in the Spanish forum would offer to fill the "position" it could be a straightforward process. Of course assuming dserrano is not really interested anymore or welcomes some help in there.


P.S.: dserrano5 - Last Active:   October 17, 2018, 04:46:01 AM - I don't think he is really that much interested anymore from what I see.

P.S.2: My mistake I see that the moderators of the Spanish local subforum are:

VGO - Last Active:   November 09, 2018, 08:22:03 PM
frankcuestein - Last Active:   January 01, 2019, 08:58:23 PM

Still not that much interested I guess, except maybe for frankcuestein.

In the Spanish local set of rules, rule number 33 (33. Posting plagiarized content is not allowed.[e]) is not included ... Rules stop at number 28, an thus lack the last 5 added rules in the translation. This is due to the fact that the post that includes the rules has not been edited since March 2017.
The author of the translation has barely been active during 2018, and thus has not been updating the post. I brought this to the attention of the local moderators, but have not since heard back.

The above non-sync between the rules written in English and those translated into local languages also happens on other local boards (last time I checked), and I posted about it here some time ago.

There are certain important threads whose ownership perhaps should be either be that of “the forum”, or at least transferrable by the moderator for cases such as these (with the pertinent tries to get the OP to sync the post himself as a first instance).

Edit: Created a thread on the matter (see Local Board forum rules asynchronisms), thread that currently lacks any flow of posts. Maybe it is not perceived as much of an issue.

I can say a copy of the translated rules in the local Spanish board does exists. I have not read it, but I can say the translation of "plagiarism" to Spanish would not really cover what I have seen in the bans appeals about plagiarism. I mean, reusing an inconsequential phrase from another post, that constitutes no original work of a certain value (ie, something that could be covered by copyright/intellectual property) would be no plagiarism.

Most (if not all) of the examples of banned users for "plagiarism" I have seen could obviously be considered complete shitposting though. And it is also obvious they don't offer anything of value to the forum (at least in those posts)... but it is not that they are attributing to themselves another person intelectual property just because of paraphrasing a worthless phrase/statement.

Not that I have ever do that (AFAIK) but I really learned what is considered "plagiarism" here by reading about those bans appeals that really surprised me on first instance.

I will now read the Spanish translation and see if it is clear enough or if some additional clarification would be needed to better be safe than sorry.

P.S.: After checking the translation of the rules in the Spanish local forum I see only rules up to 28 have been included:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/lista-no-oficial-de-reglas-si-oficiales-del-foro-guias-faq-705523

There's nothing about plagiarism at least in the OP. Please someone correct me if I am wrong as I barely frequent the local forum.

Don't know the situation of other local subforums.

I'd say you're giving this third group too much credit.

Plagiarism is theft in any culture including the Asian one. Plagiarism is appropriation of one's creation, it's just that the creation is a text but it's still taking something someone else made.

What could be done is probably seeing a lighter punishment for anyone copy/pasting while giving the source of the copy paste but no one actually does this. You either give the source then comment what you paste or don't give the source.

Most plagiarists are just lazy. Don't try to find excuses for them like cultural differences. I know no culture where it's seen as a good thing.

Those could still fall into the first category because not only do they do it and don’t care about the consequences but they also make an extra effort to conceal the plagiarised content.

That is a good point although I would not use the word plagiarise if we are trying to address those who dont understand its meaning. Just copy and paste and highlight what it is and that you WILL be banned if you do it. It should get the attention of some new users I think. Those who dont care are a lost cause anyway. It should be highlighted in such a way that they know that there is no chance to get away with it so dont try it.

This is interesting. What if a user is found copy/pasting at the beginning when he just registered his account and then as the time progressed his posting quality became better and better? Those people could be given a 2nd chance if they have contributed to the forum in a significant way.

You are educated and possess enough professionalism and culture to know what goes and what doesn't, unfortunately some people are not. But if they want to better themselves lets give them a push in that direction. Making a warning message about copy/pasting is everything the board needs to do, if they continue to ignore it, the results are their own fault.

Not can. Will. If they understand the difference between 'will' and 'can' they might see that there is a possibility to get away with it. They shouldn't think they can get away with it.

Yes, someone who is here for the first time will not know where and what Meta is and why the rules would be posted there.

Plagiarism also should have another view point.
Plagiarism which can harm, bring money loss and only brings negative consequences.
And plagiarism which can only help, can't bring money loss or harm any other member.
Most of the plagiarism around is in the bounty's as everyone here stating, but some cases people trying to get helpful information from different sources and just badly credit or not credit the original source.
In the last case, the plagiarism itself cannot harm the community or the person reading/using it and also can be helpful.
In those cases people should receive warnings but not red tags, because in many cases people didn't read the rules.
Helpful plagiarism should be treated little bit better than those who have in mind to earn money from it or harm the community.

Even if there are different cultural tolerance levels or society imbricated takes on plagiarism, it does not mean that when one ventures to a different part of the world they should be exempt from penalty (and getting aboard this forum is a bit like that). Take for example Singapore. An everyday commodity for many of us such as chewing gum is banned there. Not flashing the toilet leads you to be breaking the law, and parental caning (or even being caned for vandalism) is no stranger.

By that I mean that cultural differences should turn into needs to be better informed by those approaching a foreign culture, and not necessarily as an excuse or an extenuating factor.

Plagiarism as a result of people not reading the rules of this forum,even if we have rules sticked into META section most of the people unaware of this section at all.So having the rules running on footer or header of each pages will make some difference.

Those kind of users barely copy/paste, at least here in bitcointalk. I have seen only one case here. Possibly he was a Legendary member and participating in sig campaign. He said he did not have enough time to post since his mother was in hospital or something like that.
Other than this, everyone who complain "I am banned, why" come up with a bad English.
Anyway, this is not something which people have to learn from culture. It's all about self awareness. Using other people's resource without credit or permission isn't allowed in any culture and shouldn't be either.

I don’t condone plagiarism as it’s disrespectful to the original creators, especially without giving any credit. One solution is adding a warning on top of the “Post” button that says “Please do not copy other people’s words, you can get permenantly banned” or something similar. People not fluent in English don’t know what the term plagiarism is.

Also, If they have a history of doing bounties then most likely they are copying and posting random content as an advantage and should be permanently banned.

It should be easy for a user to read an online article and be able to write up about it in here without having to use the exact same words that was used there.
It's basic learning,that we do all the time in our schools and other works of life
Copying exactly the same thing word for word in degrading to the forum and should not be tolerated.
You can't try to earn just anyhow without at least a minimal amount of effort.
Plagiarism is one menace that should be treated with scorn both in the forum and otherwise

Your point is that some people are educated in a system where plagiarism essentially does not exist, and so coming here they do not understand it. I'm going to go off on a slight tangent here, but I hope you will indulge me while I make my point:

In my professional life, NSFW does not exist. I work in healthcare, and so am exposed to nudity, blood, guts, gore, malnourishment, injuries, deformities, military causalities, death, etc, on a daily basis. I write and review for journals, attend and present at meetings and conferences, lecture students, teach on courses, discuss online, and have never once seen or used a "NSFW" tag, even when the content includes some of the most horrific pictures imaginable. This is the standard that my colleagues and I live and work by.

However, I have the common sense to realize that if I am approaching a new medium of discussion, that it is wise to familiarize myself with and adhere to their rules, as these rules may be different to what I am accustomed to. If I went around sharing pictures of severed limbs and other such things that are commonplace in my day-to-day on this forum, then I would be banned and it would be entirely my own fault.

I'm afraid I have very little time for the people who protest their ban by pleading ignorance. It takes all of 5 minutes to read the rules.

I am from one of those countries you are talking about.
In fact, there are strict rules against plagiarism, but people don't care especially when there is no financial profit from stealing someone else's work.

If a user is smart enough to find a high quality topic off-site that should be discussed here, he should be also smart enough to read forum rules.
There should be a kind of tolerence when a member with good reputation forget to tell from where he copied his post (scarce cases).
But I can't think of any excuse for those who copy paste a previous post. Such behavior isn't related to the culture where the member come from.

We could solve a lot of these problems by just actually making people aware of the most commonly broken rules. The basic rules or etiquette should either be stated when you sign up or linked to or even better a warning displayed when you go to post along the lines of Please do not plagiarise/copy and paste other's content without proper attribution would help a lot. 


Exactly. Most have just found a loophole here and they're quick to exploit it. I'm sure there are a handful of people who might not understand the severity of what they're doing when they plagiarise content from elsewhere but for the most they're probably just greedy or lazy or even just not qualified for the job (not being able to speak English to an acceptable standard). There's absolutely no excuses for copying someone else's post from the same thread and they do that for the reasons I've just stated. Nobody in their right mind regardless of cultural differences would think that's acceptable and they know what they're doing when they do it.

      Actually, the moderators do have some latitude on exactly what action to take on a post that breaks the rules. This can be anything from deleting a post to an autoban. (or no action at all.) I have seen cases where a member is not autobanned for a copy paste. They usually take into consideration how old the post happens to be, if it can be contributed to an error, and whether it appears to be financially motivated. Also, the rules are titled "unofficial." From what I gather, Theymos is not interested in micromanaging the moderation of this board. He has delegated this responsibility to several moderators and mostly leaves it up to them to make fair decisions. He will step in if someone has a complaint about the moderation that seems to have some merit and that he disagrees with.

For reducing the number of violations, along with the captcha, can show the quotes from the most frequently violated forum rules about plagiarism, spam, duplicating posts, etc.

No 4 should be those who copy and spin texts, making it very difficult, almost impossible to track down using a pliagarism checker.
This group puts in lots of effort, which could be directed I making a half decent post, to steal and customize contents of others.

Lauda, suchmoon, I agree with both of you. And you are right, forcing someone to read something will most of the times create the opposite effect. It is like the terms and conditions that need be accepted before installing a new software.
But if it is done properly, highlighting that they WILL be banned if they plagiarise, and what to do to prevent being banned, it might get some of them to read it.

I think the clarification of what is meant by "plagiarism" stated later in the rules is pretty clear no matter what culture they are from.


Also, since I am a typical dumb American, I am monolingual. Therefore, I am not certain if a translated copy of the rules are available on the local boards. However, I believe many of the local boards do have a stickied post that gives users some idea what the rules are. If this is lacking, perhaps a push to make sure rules are available in as many languages as possible is in order. The challenge is finding capable users willing to do it.

I think plagiarism on this forum is more similar to being utterly lazy in your job than academic plagiarism. Most of those bounty hunters treat this as a source of income AND don't want to put effort into it. This irreconcilable contradiction won't be fixed by forcing them to read an explanation. I do appreciate the attempt though and I think we could do something like this even if that's just for the 1% of shitposters who could potentially be persuaded otherwise.

You can't force a user to read anything. In fact, trying to push a user to read something (such as in example B) usually leads to exactly the opposite. Most users will strongly oppose reading it.

I think that people who copy/paste and plagiarise the works of others can be divided in 3 groups:

1. Those who know what copy/pasting is, do it and don’t care about the consequences.
2. Those who intentionally copy/pasted once or twice because they were in a hurry, lacked proper knowledge about the subject and decided to take an easy route.
3. Those who have a different understanding of the plagiarism concept due to educational/cultural differences.


I would like to focus on the third group and I will start with a quote by Carol Olausen, the director of Miami's American Culture and English (ACE) Program regarding academic honesty/dishonesty:

What does this mean?
Students who come to America have different views on plagiarism because of their culture and their education.

The Asian culture is a collectivist culture.




What is the purpose of this thread?
If the American Education System has recognised that other cultures are educated and live by other standards and have a different view on the works of others, is it then not possible that one part, at least a small part of the users that get banned on Bitcointalk due to plagiarism actually don’t know what they did wrong?
Yes, there are rules here. Yes, they should read and understand the rules and adhere to them like everywhere else. If we take a look at the banned users we can certainly say that based on the way they write in English they are not from an English speaking community, correct? Their posts are full with grammatical errors and sometimes utter nonsense. How does someone who doesn’t know how to write a simple sentence or two understand the concept of plagiarism or rule 33?

33. Posting plagiarized content is not allowed
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/unofficial-list-of-official-bitcointalkorg-rules-guidelines-faq-703657


So what can be done? I can think of two things.

A) We make a thread dedicated solely to plagiarism and have it as a sticky in the Help, Off topic and especially Bounty section. At the moment there is no such sticky thread. Doing my search I found this thread > https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/guide-plagiarism-and-how-to-avoid-it-5037514
As you can see there has been no posts in it since October 2018. But the thread is good and can be used for this purpose. The thread could be updated by anyone interested to help out. I would be interested when I have the time.

Anyone reading this should understand that I am in no way protecting, justifying or finding excuses for anyone plagiarising any content here. I do my part as well in reporting and posting about such content in the Report plagiarism thread in Meta. I would just like to offer another view and try to help that small part of users who might not know that copying content is a serious offence.   

B) After a user registers on the forum he should be redirected to the above thread. The thread will explain in layman terms what copy/pasting is, why it should not be done and that posting plagiarised content here WILL result in a permanent ban. There will also be examples of posts that got other users banned and examples of proper quoting and citation.


Source: https://www.turnitin.com/blog/cultural-differences-in-plagiarism


Feel free to share your thoughts.