Topic: Plagiarism should remain a zero-tolerance bannable offense (Read 1148 times)

No, I reckon that any mod who saw that being quoted, would look at the context and deem it to be a simple mistake.
I mean, it's generally pretty easy to spot honest mistakes among deliberate acts of plagiarism. Some people ITT call it murky, but I disagree, most cases are pretty clear.

As I've mentioned in the OP, these are not the cases I'm talking about, I'd classify this as a simple mistake and yes, they're fairly easy to spot.
Sure, mistakes can happen with regards to moderating, but once it's laid out in the open and looked at by many people, I think almost everyone would agree that it's a simple case of posting a quote and genuinely forgetting to add the source.

If I post this:

I would think that just having the quotes there would be enough to discount it from being plagiarism. It's also perfectly logical to have the quotes there, since, well, you're posting a quote...

Should I add a source to that quote? Or would that be fine without it? I'd think it would be fine without it, although I'd argue that adding it is just a bit more polite to do, so:

Source: Charles Caleb Colton

I think you should ask theymos do you need to put humor under quotation and post source, but the moment you do all that it loses its purpose and it is not funny any more, therefore that prayer shouldn't even be there.

I am pretty sure correct term for this exist and it is definitely not plagiarism  

Right. So go back to the example that I showed. Was my mistake delibarate? If yes, why? If not, why not? How can you, as an outsider tell?

Completely fair response, I guess it would be acceptable to issue a temporary punishment in cases where plagiarism happened a long time ago and the person has stopped doing this afterwards.
I'm all for letting people learn from their mistakes and giving them a second chance, even though the OP indicates otherwise.

Guess I can't really comprehend why someone would take such a stupid shortcut on purpose. To me it seems such a simple thing to avoid really and I do really hate the practise of stealing someone's words and passing them as one's own. Heck, I'd be able to write much more intelligent responses if I were able to do that :')


Well, that is not what I'm saying though, I'm specifically focusing on the deliberate act of passing off someone's work as your own. By definition, something like that cannot happen by accident.
But hey, maybe it's better to just agree to disagree.

It's irrelevant when it was done as people should know this wouldn't be acceptable. If you purposely plagiarised someone else's post whether to farm an account or for financial gain then that tells us all we need to know and you're here for the wrong reasons. There's really no excuses for plagiarism other than laziness and greed.


If people try skirting their sig ban by monetising their avatars then they should also be removed. If they're not then maybe even negative feedback should be considered if they try monetise themselves in such a way as this is essentially just evading their bans.

Is it the case from which bitcointalk.org forum has feature to see edited time of post/ thread? I checked the topic, but did not see such information on the activation day of Edited time Display. In my experience, I saw Edited time on my mobile devices just recent months, maybe in the early days of 2019, not in 2018. It is easy to realize on mobile devices because Edited time automatically displayed. On computer or laptop, we have to scroll mouse to the line of Publishing time to see Edited time.

If they disappear and return after their signature ban expired, it means they didn't deserve the lenience in the first place.

Admins can see all old versions of edited posts.
A better way of framing someone would be to use an external site under your control, and fake the creation date of a post. This has happened.

I agree, primarily that was the main reason. Tho, as we look at the human system when it comes to crime even the death penalty can be revoked. So as I have said as long as they know what they have done wrong then solemnley swear that they will be no longer doing the same mistakes plus did some good deeds as well during the said period of time then "it might slightly" be considerable.





I personally hate it when somebody does that to those users who commit the said crime. I have also seen people demanding because of their said contribution (which actually makes them a very terrible user in this community).

There is quote button available for use, and help us more easily to mention as well as point out previous posts/ discussions without fear of plagiarism violations. Human can make mistakes, even with plagiarism, sometimes we unintentionally make it (but such unintentional plagiarism is so rare), but most of times, people plagiarised mainly due to their laziness, and financial motivation behind (such as want to get easy money by copying and pasting to hit post quota). In my opinion, it's hard to explain why users do plagiarism and get sympathy as well as reduced sentence for that. Therefore, by now there are very limited users whom received reduced sentences.
There are some users whom made ban appeals for others, but I don't know such ban appeals on behalf of real banned users will be considered as ban evasion or not. By now, within current terrible banwave, I have not seen admins or global moderators call it as ban evasions. In addition, I guess what you actually meant about changes is things, contributions or net-effects in the forum that users did after his or her plagiarism (when they were not found) and before the permanent-banned days. It is sure that such contributions play important role in investigation procedures of admins, and global moderators.

I personally don't like copying someone's post. Tho, even if I was a victim before of the said issue. I still consider some cases in which they have known, have understood and have changed their mistake.


Therefore I personally support un - banning plagiarist who Do not ask for it  but have shown his/her effort to change it. Other than that if the said plagiarizing was made not by mistake and for gaining some incentives then a permaban is really worth the punishment

Bullshit. There is zero reason for lauda to post about this if this was the extent of his plagiarism.

The implication of lauda posting about this is that he previously plagiarized and wants you to either not report any plagiarism of his that you find, or for you to not look for his plagiarism, or for you to warn him of any plagiarism you find before you report it.

Mods are not sane too to ban such kind of report when it was being qouted meaning to say that it is not being owned by the one who posted it. Anyway, I think there is no need to report that kind of post and it is a common sense. It should not be to avoid also getting bad report.

Yes you do. The answer is - you're not sane if you think a post with a quote inside quote tags can be reported as plagiarism. But you're welcome to try.

Ban.

What about the situation where the plagiarised posts predate the posting of the forum rules relating to plagiarism/copypasta?

I've seen it mentioned a couple of times now that the rules relating to plagiarism were only added mid-2016.

I think I have my answer

well some what true but not exactly.

When you have 30,000 posts like lauda or me  the signature gets 30,000 billboard spots.

I have multiple locked and pinned threads.  So if I were to sell my signature and not post for a week I am pretty sure people would see a lot of that signature.

For years I left simple mining in my signature at zero charge to him.

I am pretty sure my signature was viewed 1,000,000 plus times for him and for my quote that alt coins are good for cryptocurrency.

 I did it for zero fees. I don't know how many people used his service due to my signature. Pretty sure he does not know either. But the point is lauda has a

lot of posts. As do I.  I have 9 alt coin threads alone with edit  over 500,000 1,000,000 views  when added together

9 has 759 views
8 has  69,000 +
7 has  33,000 +
6 has  79,000 +
5 has  46,000 +
4 has 108,000 +
3 has  41,000 +
2 has  147,000 +
1 has    50,000 +

total over 573,000 views.

You want me to tag you now, or now?

Fair deal. Thanks for answering.

Cut and dry ban

In that case no sane person would report it and certainly no mod would ban for it.

It did have the quote I think. I don't even know who the source is now, nor do I care much (other than it having a link to the website).

I mean - I don't know how it looked like before you added the source. Did it have quote tags? I'm not familiar with the source but it might go under the Shakespeare exemption even without quoting or attribution.

I don't care, stop crying. I'll tag you and everyone related to you over and over again.

It is not a conspiracy theory nor is it off topic. The way lauda is acting is consistent with him trying to setup an excuse for plagiarizing.

This sticks out like a sore thumb in part because he has advocated for tagging people for doing nearly every other action.

I think laudas punishment for plagiarism, if he is found to have plagiarized to be the same as everyone else, and his deleted posts and alts should also be checked.

Wrong. I think I plagiarized[1]. I never paid any attention to it, then again which spammer did? I believe that it is quite likely that I messed up at least several times even after I stopped spamming given my post count. I'm waiting along with many other DT members to see who is going to get banned. The only difference being that I've served not one, but two punishments for all my posts up until year XYZW (I don't remember). Quite funny this one is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It isn't, he's just trying to spin this as mallicious; he doesn't even read any previous posts, he just shitposts nowdays[2]. Next campaign that hires him gets a negative rating. Hence we are back to this.

I think it's time I revised his trust rating description.

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[1][2]

*insert another off-topic conspiracy theory*

Me thinks lauda has plagiarized in the past.

If this is true, if the administration is not running the plagiarism bot themselves, the question becomes if the person running the bot is trustworthy enough to report lauda. It would probably be a good idea to have the bot go back and check the 3000+ posts lauda deleted on his alt account and any other alt accounts he has.

The example is in the same post and the question was actually referring to it. Take another look. Thanks.

Hard to say without an example but probably not, if I can see any indication that you're not intentionally passing the text as your own words. I'm assuming you weren't just copy-pasting a paragraph of text and hitting "Post". Anything in quotes, quote tags, indented, bolded, following a colon, etc should be given the benefit of the doubt, even if the source is not explicitly stated. Then there is context and common sense. If you paste a Shakespeare piece it's not going to be plagiarism regardless of formatting or references. If you paste a paragraph from Coindesk though... better not do that.

Nobody asked you anything you filthy degenerate. What I wrote is objectively true, I generate more advertisement without posting anything than most people do by actively posting. Go back to your account-farming pajeet hole.

Nonsense. if you have a paid sig that doesn’t require any specific number of posts, if you don’t make sufficient numbers of posts the company will decide to stop paying you to advertise. This is true even if you don’t have a specific post count expectation.

This was the plagiarism from today. Don't ask how it came to be, but it was a legitimate mistake (though mitigated within a minute).


It's quite murky. It's easy on random shit-posting baboons in pay-per-post campaigns. Say I had forgotten to include that source today. Would you have banned me? Note: Even though I wear a signature, I am not required to do anything thus making 1 or 1000 posts makes no difference. Financial motivation is a no-go here, and I most certainly did not intend to pass that as "my own work". So?

I don’t think anyone is getting banned for accidental plagiarism such as forgetting to cite a source. Nor is anyone getting banned for responding to a quote that lacks any kind of source.

Bans are not being given because of broken BB code. They are being given out because someone clearly tried to pass off someone else’s words as their own. Often the copied words would appear to be nonsense if it were to be assumed to not be plagiarized. Almost always there is a financial motivation.

I am in favor of allowing someone to stay if the plagiarism was from a long time ago and they have subsequently shown themselves to otherwise be productive forum members. However there should be severe punishment.

I agree with you, with a lot of common topics being posted as a new one then we will obviously have a lot of similar answers who have been posted in the past. But this kind of plagiarism doesn't exist in the forum or at least set an alarm to hunters as it still counts as their own created post. Mostly the copy pasters who have been banned directly have just copy and pasted the post or added some few words of their own or in some rare cases they just translate a foreign language to an english text to make it their own words, none of them actually create their own post with their own content. Posts that have been directly copy and pasted are obvious as they haven't even change the structure of the sentence .

From my experience - if the edit timestamp is later than the other post, the report will be marked as "bad" regardless of what actually was edited. Even if it's not, that would be a very easy appeal.

Technicalities are not an issue. It's a bit more murky when it gets to intent (was the user blatantly copy-pasting, or paying homage?), which is where mod discretion comes in.

I think that Lauda is trying to say that everyone can, by mistake, say something already said by someone else with your own words. That somehow I may say something very close to what Satoshi said in his whitepaper, for example, and be banned for plagiarism for that .

This may be considered plagiarism in an University.... And I agree that it is plagiarism, But not here.

The point is that this is not plagiarism in this forum. Plagiarism is being checked by bots and is only banning, afaik, only word to word copies.

Plagiarism by mistake is hard to prove. If it looks like someone plagiarized a content, it usually is by copy pasting it. They may have no intention of owning it themselves but you can just find someone will write exactly how the real author did. Rewriting content is even something that is unforgivable if you own the original, you'd feel violated if the copied contents actually grab more credits than yours.

In this world, right here. Read again:

Acceptable or not, fact is that it can, has, and will happen as a mistake. Claiming otherwise is DISHONEST. This is not even up for debate as it's a factual statement. Hence, end of story.

You need to hover over the date-time.

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Meh, removed insult as this is stupid to the point of not being worth it.

I see it as this  which means anyone could be attacked and it looks like there was something wrong when in fact  there was no issue done wrong.  Except by a scumbag fucking with the innocent person.

frankly I do not like copycats but I am not sure how to tell if someone did an edit and planted fake info against someone.

This would obviously be easy to use against people not liked or people that do good things stopping scammers.

Nice, attacking my point with passive-aggressive insults.


How is plagiarism an acceptable mistake? Do you even know what plagiarism means?

From the Oxford Dictionary:

Source: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/plagiarism

In what world is it ever acceptable to pass someone else's work off as your own? That's what we're talking about, right?


Edit: I know I'm sounding a bit hypocritical here, since my reply is also fairly passive-aggressive. Sorry for that.

Those are the same things they've always said, and it's definitely bullshit. 

I'm not sure what the situation is with plagiarism bans right now--are people still getting permabans with some people getting exceptions in the form of signature bans?  If Theymos made an official post about it, I must have missed it--but I do know exceptions are being made for members who are otherwise productive members of the forum.

The main issue IMO with the recent mass banning is that the punishment is (I'm assuming) for plagiarism that happened a long time ago, and some of these members might not have repeated that behavior since then.  In those cases I do think it's very harsh to permaban them, though I think a signature ban is appropriate. 

OP, I agree that plagiarism is despicable and shouldn't be tolerated--but even if not all of the members who recently got caught got permabanned, it's definitely sending a loud and clear message to would-be plagiarists.  Hopefully we'll see a lot less of it from here on out.

That's a different problem, yes. There's this:



However, that is not nearly adequate. A moderator does not see what has changed. Also it could be used as a timed-attack. Insert it now and report in 2 years. That is another reason why this thread is bullshit. Imagine if we just banned you forever, philipma1957, because you plagiarised some random post 6 years ago?

So what safeguard from a person looking to hurt someone from doing this to an old post


I went back to an old post and cut and pasted  the bold so it now looks like my cut and paste is original and Lauda's is a copy.

Yet it happened, yet I did it. We're talking about today. It has probably happened many times to me in the past. It has probably happened to many other people as well. You don't read a lot, do you?

Absolute e-warior bullshit. Nobody in the real world strongly cares about that unless we're talking about published/for-profit work. Focusing on such nonsense is why people remain with narrow-minded. Miss me with your virtue signalling bullshit. It is a acceptable mistake especially when it is done once or even very very rarely.

Seriously shut up. The average narrow minded Joe doesn't have this problem, and I assume you are one. I'll be damned if I haven't passed off someone else's statements as my own thinking they are my own while destroying the block-size bullshit.

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We are not talking about word-for-word plagiarism. We are talking about any kind of plagiarism. An unsourced paraphrase of someone's statement is plagiarism. If you don't believe this can happen by mistake, then you truly are a delusional, narrow-minded monkey. If I am resorting to such strong words, then you can be assured how stupid your thread is.

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[1] Do you think anyone (in their right state-of-mind), who knows you and knows me, cares whether you believe me or not? The chance that I made this up, with zero beneficial incentive, is zero.

for example / example:
If a student in the school is known to copy (copy paste), the class lecturer will definitely give a score or be released at school for the student.

In the world choose literature, creative ideas for every human being, in discussing at the Forum.
Likewise in the world of Bitcointalk, copy-paste, plagiarism is literature, an illegal idea that is very hated by the bitcointalk Forum.
The point is copy- paste activities are classified as despicable acts that have never been accepted everywhere.


In this case all discussion activities must have ideas from each other's brain, for that bitcointalk forum strictly prohibits the meaning of plagiarism:

Meaning:
[1] Copy words or ideas from
others as their own.
[2]. Provide incorrect information about other people's quotes.
[3]. Copy so many words or ideas from sources that are part of most of your writing.

So it's the problem of copying (plagiarism), at the Bitcointalk Forum it has been final regarding the decisions of members being blocked since 2009.

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I believe most of them will less active although they will not disappear fully. Extend tepm ban without signature ban could not prove "contribution" of banned user. I think that is not easy task to abuse signature ban due to merit system. No one could easily skip it, they have to earn merit if they want to abuse ban but likely they will not able to do it. For example almost need a year to become Sr. member and need merit as well.

Overall I think current ban system is enough fine. They should say thanks to theymos that they are not banned permanently.

Quoting and Plagiarizing are different things.
If the user is not mentioning the source and puts none of his/her opinion but fully copy pasted content as his/her own, they should be immediately banned.

I agree with this.
If you read a funny Tweet or something like that and you wanna say it again and you don't k ow the source , just write"I read this on Twitter, but I don't know where" or something like that.

This may be a problem for content writers, people who write articles.. they may be plagiarising their own articles by mistake. But this ban could be reversed (I think)

Maybe there could be some different punishment for old plagiarism (like 3-4 years, which is cellard case I believe). Maybe he should just receive a warning or a sig ban

I really don't know how someone could make a mistake like that. I mean the chances of you accidentally writing the same content as someone else, word-for-word, are just so small.
This reads as something you'd find in /r/thathappened to be honest. Without any concrete example of what you wrote, it really hard to believe you on this.

I mean if you just think logically about it, who writes a post and then consciously thinks about checking whether it's been written before, using the exact same words and structure?


Gee, thanks :-/ I was obviously talking about the conscious act of copying someone's work and passing it off as your own. Yes, if you do that, you're a shit person. I stand by what I said there.

If someone is financially motivated, he would not post as like he did before the ban. It would be easy to track if the list of users are limited. But from what I observed, there are hundreds of banned people and it would not be that easy to track their activities.
I would say sig ban must be of at least 1 year and if in case any user continue to contribute to the forum despite their sig ban, some reputed members vouch for them as well after some months, their ban can be reversed.

How about we give it some time, 90-120 days to let the temp bans expire and see how the sig-less copy-pasters perform. Will some of them disappear due to not getting paid? In which case the sig ban is good enough, as it gives good users a second chance and effectively bans the financially-motivated ones. Will they abuse the sig ban? Not sure how they would do that though.

Then again if the pros really outweighs the cons (which is just one plagiarized content) then I think it really do justify the ban being lifted by the admins. I've seen good posters, legendary members, and trustworthy person at present just got banned because of their plagiarized post which was posted 3-5 years ago that they obviously made when they were still low ranking members in the forum. Honestly digging dirt from them which was posted like I said 3-5 years ago shows how much they have changed and improved all through out their stay in the forum, and banning them from the mistake a couple years back would be a real waste of a good forum member.

For me I would rather have these permaban lifted members back rather than have low ranking members posting generic messages as well as spam all through out the forum, they might not be plagiarizing but it sure is an eyesore for me and maybe for other members as well.

I don't agree that all did it intentionally and it depends on when and why did the user post the content. It's not like these members kept doing it and are getting excused for this. Everyone has got either a temp-ban or sig-ban and this was because they did it years ago and not recently. Some did it once 4 years back so the perm-ban wouldn't be fair as they have contributed to the forum. Although it's wrong, they deserve a temp-ban in such cases.


The members claiming it are taking the forum for granted. Nobody can be unaware of a simple fact that you can't copy-paste other people's posts.




The moderator hence is checking all posts to see if the user did it by mistake on intentionally did it and if he is a repeat offender. Some members did it without realizing it is plagiarism and since they have been here for years and done it like 3-4 years back, the 60 days ban is fine. I've also done mistakes of posting emails without adding the source link and just using quotes. Theymos made it clear that this is not considered plagiarism.


It's all in the hands of the mods of this forum and I feel even mods are confused of who deserves what punishment. I may not like a person who has plagiarized for any kind of benefit but here the time matters as they are not repeat offenders.

Also, please note that in some cases the member's account was hacked and the hacker plagiarized posts to get the owner permanently banned. People are taking advantage of this mass ban.

This is utter bullshit. I almost made this mistake today, and the only thing that reminded me to review my post was all this plagiarism paranoia that has been going on the past few days. I did not even know where the thing that I posted was from, i.e. had absolutely no idea it was plagiarism without a source until I looked it up.

It's a soap-opera-like discussion forum, I'm not submitting a dissertation for crying out loud. How do I de-merit this thread to oblivion?

Some of the banned users are high ranked and they have a good posting habit, (ex. bill gator, cellard). Nevertheless, if their copy posts were for any kind of financial motivation/ gaining incentives, I would say they deserve a permanent ban. On the other hand, if they intended to help other (no monetary gaining affiliated), they must not be banned, this would be the exception.
I am not sure how to be certain about monetary affiliation of their posts. I guess there's way but it will be time consumable as well. Therefore, the current punishment of a certain time of signature ban is perfect, if they intend to help other, they will continue. If they are here for monetary gain, they will go away.

I've seen a bunch of topics where people argue that there should be some leeway given to long-time members who've plagiarized and have been banned because of that.

Examples:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/improving-the-current-ban-situation-5145434 (Improving the current ban situation)
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/any-managers-lost-good-posters-due-recent-mass-ban-5144084 (Any managers lost good posters due recent mass ban?)

Instead of replying to those topics and arguing why I personally don't agree with the soft-handed approach they're suggesting, I thought it was a better idea to start a dedicated topic about it.

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Plagiarism is not a simple mistake in most cases, it's a conscious decision that people make in order to increase their post count and make money off of that.
Frankly, anyone who engages in copying other people's work without giving proper credit for it, should get banned immediately without any exceptions.

We've all seen the excuses in the recent mass ban appeals, first they claim to have no idea why they were banned and then they claim it's 'such a hard punishment' for a 'simple' mistake.

I say bullshit to that, everybody should know that you don't just copy someone else's exact words and pass it off as your own.
There's not a single good reason why long-time members who've plagiarized in the past should be given a second chance. (in my opinion at least)

Mind you, I've made some stupid posts myself when I was still a newbie, but it never crossed my mind to just copy/paste stuff to increase my post count.
Most people don't plagiarize, because they're just decent persons, so I'd highly recommend not giving any free-passes to those who do plagiarize.

Heck, I'm actually also against the signature bans (instead of banning them) that Bitcointalk gives to high-profile members who've plagiarized, but offer value to the forum.

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I do have to add that some people might actually 'plagiarize' by accident and those cases should be treated differently.
By that I mean, someone adding a quote from a website to their post, but forgetting to add the source.

Something like that is pretty easy to spot, if they've also added enough unique content to their post and placed the quote in actual bbcode quotes.