Topic: Plagiarism: Where Do We Draw the Line? (Read 873 times)

The lengths some people will go to in order to avoid having an original thought are pretty amazing. I mean, how hard is it to just think of a sentence in your head and transcribe it into a post?

The other day a WO semi-regular was banned for copying sports articles written in Italian and Google Translating them. He was a legendary too. Possibly the worst part is he's not even Italian.

There are clever indexing methods that make this kind of search relatively quick and also can match slight variations, even word spinning to an extent.

I'm not really sure what you're proposing (checking your posts against all other posts? why exactly?) but the plagiarism problem in general is not a technical one. We can use all sorts of tricks to catch plagiarists and they'll just make their posts more and more obscure - copying from outside sources, translating from other languages, etc - as long as there is a financial incentive to do so.

Right. As the number of posts increase, so does the amount of time it takes to check one additional post.

You are describing one way in which all current posts could be checked for plagiarism (at least plagiarism by copying other users' posts).

What you describe is missing two things. Existing posts would not be checked for plagiarism, and if a post is written in the future and is subsequently plagiarized, the setup you describe would not catch it.

That's not too difficult to do and prove. One way you can prove the article is yours and that the account that posted it belongs to you is to put up links in the source someone claims you stole it from that point to all the other sites where you posted the article. That should include Bitcointalk. That's sufficient proof that you are the same person. Or you know the original poster and/or paid him to help you. 

If you don't mind, can you lead us to this case through a link or something. AFAIK, in such cases, if the user has ample/sufficient proof that he owns the account that initially published/posted the article in another platform, social media or whatever, then they prolly wouldn't be banned, the only problem here is the means by which such user is going to prove beyond reasonable doubts to be reposting an already existing work of his. Having said that though, copying your article exactly the same way and posting on numerous platforms is somewhat unnecessary, since you wrote the initial topic yourself, you can just basically do a brief overview of it, and obviously it'll come in different words, then at the end of it, you just simply put a link to of course the original source which still happens to be your work.

Plagiarism is totally a copy and paste of already existing work which everyone is aware of, so members or users that are into plagiarism only think of their upliftment or benefit alone, the reason while majority of them associate into altitude of yours its because they need to be mentioned, known and also make their work to be perfect, so narrating or using it via bitcointalk community here, the objective of uses who indulged in such is to earn a huge merits that will elevate them. So not knowing that plagiarism is not a work of initiative, right now a plagiarism can be called a setback from my principles of understanding of plagiarism.

Thanks for chiming in. Discussing these things is always interesting. You are talking about the time complexity of such a search and match algorithm. I read some of this stuff back when I took a course in Python. It was enlightening to read about algorithms and make small enumeration programs. Programming i guess is all about practice and actually building upon existing complexity. I did make a program to sort for myself a very poorly formatted data fed into excel in CSV forms. But having been busy in other stuff did not leave room to continue learning.

You'd first need a set of master data with all possible 6 word snippets of text from all the existing posts. (provided someone is copying only from existing Bitcoin posts). This would then have to be compared with the set of snippets formed from every new post. While this could be done, I believe the space and memory requirements would be pretty huge. Though, doesn't google do it for like, all of the internet? And Altavista used to do it at one time. Now, google has humungous capacity of course but I don't think that the old sites like Altavista had those.

I personally faced a problem that one gets banned only for publishing own articles. Mod bens for plagiarism, but don't understand why they banned them from publishing their own article. He was a crypto blogger, used to publish the same article on different platforms. If other social platform does not interrupt then getting banned is hard to see. I think moderators should update the system to justify the members.
One user works day by day to contributes to the country and builds a reputable profile but one flag can destroy the dignity.
Note It's all my own opinion.

It is not terribly difficult to remove things such as quotes from posts. Markup (things such as bold, and links) can also be removed trivially.

Splitting up the text of posts into sets of 6 words will be expensive, but is doable. A text with n words will have n - 6 sets of words.

The problem is that it is really not possible to check every new post for plagiarism because the cost of checking an additional post will grow for every additional post written. For example, if there are 100 posts that exist on the forum, the cost of checking a new post against all existing posts is 100 units. Once there are 1000 posts on the forum, the cost of checking a single new post against all existing posts is 1000 units. For each additional post made, it costs one additional unit to check a single additional post. This is obviously not sustainable.

In fact, in a sense, all our speeches and the knowledge we have learned are the summaries of our predecessors. This is the result of our childhood learning, including some technical language, when we are expressing our views. Is this plagiarism? The definition of plagiarism should be copied throughout. If you say a few celebrities, you will be judged plagiarism, which is a bit nitpicking. Plagiarism is prohibited and originality is encouraged. There is nothing wrong with it. I have no objection to banning accounts because of plagiarism, but I am a bit unacceptable because of the bones in the skin of the egg.

If i had anywhere near the skills needed to do this, I would probably be a software dev myself and not installing propulsion equipment in train engines, LOL. Its more of an idea for someone with the dev skills to do it. I can then give myself one of those pompous managerial designations like "Research design consultant" or something.

A general algorithm would probably parse through all of the post history and compare it with everyone else's in snippets of 6 words each finding a match percentage. Lots of enumeration, which I was never good at. Then you'd have to root out the edge cases like quotes and references. It can be done and could even be an interesting open source project.

EDIT: Maybe if we had a sort of hackathon bounty for it for building this and some other tools on a platform like Gitcoin. Would be great to see a Bitcointalk Tribe in Gitcoin. See, there i go giving away "ideas" again.What say ya? @Theymos

Research is all about reading and compelling other people's work into your own, this is all what a literature review is all about, checking bitcoin wallpaper you could see lots of references made by Satoshi, invention is a gradual process you can't do it all alone you take other people's work and try to take advantage of their weakness, give solution to it and that's it but a reference must be made to the existed /copied project. Merits fishing or not do not steal people's work without citing them.

There was, yeah. I think Lauda even said something like if someone were to go through all his/her posts, they could probably find cases where there are missing sources. I am not 100% sure about this, but I think that's how I remember it.

I thought and wrote about that yesterday.


Imagine you like helping others with their issues regarding Bitcoin, wallets, security, etc. Now imagine there are 5, 10, 20, X number of other people doing the same. All of you have similar interests, you are all writing similar recommendations, use similar terminology, phrases, etc. Sooner or later, there will be 2 or3 posts that lookalike. But that's why admins take their time and probably consider many factors before applying the ban hammer. 

Text spinning, paraphrasing are considered as plagiarism. If you intentionally spin text around, paraphrase original content and intentionally (sure for such cases) skip source of content, you are plagiarist.

In academic space, plagiarism is treated more seriously than in the forum.

Softwares are tools to detect potential cases, then moderators will handle it with support from softwares and community reports.

Even if such a software exists, it should use the famous "five consecutive words" rule. Also, it could be some set of plagiarism rules implemented by the software developers. I think the plagiarism rules frequently adopted are not that universal  based, rather based on ethical considerations. I think some plagiarism rules in this forum are not cast on stones but rallies around the intention and level of prior positive contributions.
If some strictness would be applied in explanation rather than implementation it will be fine cool.

he also found Pokapoka124's plagiarism. It seems to me to be a more serious case than Mpamaegbu (I see you followed the whole thing there), Pokapoka124 even tried to avoid everything by subsequently adding source links.

I don't really know while some person's engaged in plagiarism, if someone wants to impact knowledge to another person through someone's work or already existing articles i think the best option is that after using the work you have to add the source to indicate that is work is does not belong to you, some people claim that they are author of the work, and that is one of the major reason that put them into trouble.

How do you know that? 

You think?  If that's true, I wonder if it's being done by members who didn't get accepted into the campaign, other forum members, or the campaign manager.  Whatever the case may be, it's probably a good idea (though Mpamaegbu got caught in such an investigation, and personally I think it was a stupid mistake on his part).  Plagiarists certainly don't need to be rewarded for stealing other people's work.

Go for it if you want (I don't know how good your researching skills are), or maybe someone like LoyceV or one of the statistics gurus will do it.  If someone does do it though, I do hope it doesn't result in good members getting banned--unless they obviously deserve to be.

He has a couple of hours until he gets banned, since his idea is only to divert attention.

Well this issue really isn't just one for the forum but probably one that linguists and proof-readers must also struggle with. Isn't there some advanced software that academic institutions use to detect plagiarism? Wonder if we can get an overview of the algorithm used by that software. That could easily govern the set of rules that should form plagiarism.

One more thing to take note is that most users who get onto good campaigns start getting scrutinized by a lot of people. I remember that there was an instance of plagiarism even against someone like "Lauda", who i believe was never at a loss of words and would have been silly to use someone else's words.

Then again, writing 2000 plus posts over 4 years while reading articles and gathering information from multiple sources, is it possible that a person's words may seem plagiarized. I think it is difficult to come to a conclusion without some real world exercise. Why not do a challenge here at the forum. I think there are a lot of original posters here with 2-4000 samples of their writing available. I can emphatically claim that I have NEVER copied anything verbatim or intentionally. If i use an article, i just put them in quotes. Yet, who is to say that I never missed adding the quotes in making 2000 posts, or that my thought train was not somehow affected by what I may have read somewhere else, in a way that even if am writing those words on my own, they are sub-consciously mirroring something I have read the same day or a few days before.

This could be an interesting exercise if done on the, say, 100 most prolific and discernibly original posters on the forum. I think I will make the cut in atleast the top 200, if not 200100. Anyways, that an idea right there for the OP to check "Where to draw the line".

I don't really get your definition of accidental plagiarism as, it doesn't really nail the issue done. It humps around gathering contents and posting without citation or referencing. That too is intention because, it was done within the range of the freewill. Ignorance might play a role to plagiarism but then, all plagiarism issues on the forum are intentional and it often comes out of a persons lack of proper orientation and in ability to create contents of their own. Now a lot of things can cause this, either your scared, you ain't used to writing, you undermine yourself and ideas etc.

A good writer and someone whom is learned enough would always know that, plagiarism is an offense and haven't been used to a discussion platform and by that mean, other than bitcointalk, these rules should have have a common get by.

I don't think that forum should bother to differentiate those two things, I just said that it maybe wouldn't be a bad thing if there is some other punishment other than perma ban for newbie members. AFAIK, there were cases in which now respected members of the forum were retroactively caught for plagiarism due ignorance when they were newbies, and were given 2nd chance via signature ban due their efforts later on. So who knows, maybe we would get more cases like that if newbies get sig ban at first, because those with bad intentions will most likely just create new account and go on with their merit farming. Rinse and repeat until they manage to reach some rank that will enable them to join signature campaigns.

There's no difference between 'accidental' or 'intentional' plagiarism since the outcome is the same. Whether the act is done unilaterally or accidental, if the copied content is plagiarized then you suffer the consequences listed on the forum.

The very nature of plagiarism stems from a person causing it to appear that he/she originally did the work, but in fact, copied it without the consent of the original author. Like in our law, even if you do not have any bad intention to do something, but if the law prohibits it then you are liable malum prohibitum.

Sometimes when newbies publish, they don’t search in advance, or don’t know where to search, don’t pay attention to other software, and don’t know there are similar articles in other places. but! If the entire article is exactly the same, it means plagiarism, or plagiarism from other software articles.

If only one or two sentences in the article are similar, I guess it should not be plagiarism, it should be similar to the author's thinking when thinking. So when we see a similar article, we can check this post to ask if it has been plagiarized or if it was published.

But I think why plagiarize on the forum? These are all thoughts and comments. If you want to give a speech, you can do it. Why copy other people's ideas?

True, plagiarism is sometimes discovered months or even years after it was commited, so if multiple cases of plagiarism are discovered, just give perma ban and that's about it. But, there are cases (albeit very rare) where genuine newbies get rekted right from the start due ignorance and maybe in that cases sig ban for some longer period could be implemented, instead of permanent ban.


Yep, that would be a good start. Doesn't even have to be for all ranks, but let's say while you are newbie/Jr Member.

There are lot of members here who mostly copy an article posted on the internet which is related to cryptocurrency and also add their opinions about the title and article so they are being informative whicb few newbie get inspired but forgot to add the source which can be the only sign of accidental plagiarism but if forum allows such kind of plagiarism by giving execuse to them then every newbie will do that and say that they did it without acknowledging it.

How's it an accidental when you intentionally browser out what you copied and didn't add sources which means you're passing that information as yours. That you weren't informed about such actions been punishable on the forum is no excuse as we have rules that guide the forum and everyone is to get familiarize with the rules before even beginning exploring the forum. The rules although aren't official aren't hidden so you have no excuse to plagiarized.

On the other hand, the only time I could think of an accidental plagiarism is when you quote a famous quotes and probably forget to highlight the owner of that quote but you have already made it clear in your reply that you're quoting someone. Most of the punished cases of plagiarism involves the accuses coping an article online without linking the source.

The moderators clearly punished those their intentions were merely to pass the work they copied as theirs probably for the merits or acknowledgement of been quality contributors. I have seen scenario of reported posts just been deleted instead of punishing the offenders, clearly those cases weren't seen as an attempt to pass someone else works as theirs.

It's hard to determine the intent for sure but I don't agree that it's impossible. Maybe we can call it intentional plagiarism if a member does it more often than what would be acceptable as accident? Like it's considered accidental if he forgot to place the link to an article only once or twice?

Perhaps a warning for the first found offence could go a long(ish) way, but one of the drawbacks would be that plagiarism isn’t detected on-the-fly, meaning that a given account could incur in plagiarism over time, but may not be reported until way later down the road when he’s already accumulated multiple such offences. I’d still favour a clear, easy to implement, warning above the text box when creating a post (just below the emojics).

I do appreciate if there is any changes in the ban policy for anyone plagiarism because we make mistakes that is the common thing in the humans but how we are going to differentiate the accidental plagiarism and intentional plagiarism since impossible to identify, so everyone will hide under the accidental mistake when they get ban and enjoy the perks.

Now that you mentioned hard slap on the wrist, that's one of the things I would like to do see being used more often when it comes to plagiarism offense. So, instead giving insta ban to new members, rather give them let's say one year sig ban, and in case they do the same thing again, then give them permanent ban.

I mean, I am perfectly aware of the fact that vast majority of newbies are doing that on purpose and just for the sake of getting to higher ranks and joining signature campaigns, but every once in a while there might be some genuine user who will make that mistake without having bad intentions.

Spot on. Pretty sure that if it was their work being stolen like that they would be pretty pissed. Folks like that DESERVE a hard slap on the wrist for 1st offense. If they continue to do it then kick their ass to the curb with the rest of the trash.

As they blithely copy/paste their stolen text into a post they have the source right in front of them so:
  A) make it clear that the material came from elsewhere and not from their feeble brain
  B) Include links to it

FYI, paraphrasing is a plagiarism too, if you don't cite the original source so it won't look any better if newbies try do to that in order to avoid getting banned. If anything, it might be even worse as that means they know what they are doing is wrong, yet they are trying to get away with it in order to appear more knowledgeable and get few merits.

As others suggested, I would like it too if upon creation of account there is an explanation of some of the most important rules, and what can breaking of the rules lead to. Ignorance is not a valid excuse of course, but for some  this is the first forum they ever registered on, and probably have no idea/never really though about plagiarizing as an issue, so this could be even educational.

Regarding plagiarism, I think that verbatim copy without proper text formatting should be seen as such, as in it's essence it is plagiarism (not here though). It doesn't have to be bannable offense, but at least something like signature ban for some period of time.

It again boils down to whether they are going to read that or just click on 'agree' and 'continue' to get rid of the notifications and warnings and access the forum as soon as possible. My previous post with the countdown proposal achieves a similar result for those who want to see what is in front of their eyes. At this point I will support almost anything that involves making the rules about copy-pasting and spamming more visible. 

But there are so many person here do that its because they want to make their works more faster although they know the risk that they might get compromised but they didn't care since majority of forum users do that are newbie account user, so maybe to combat this action the campaign managers should put some strict rules about it and always check the content submitted by their participants sometimes there are lazy bounty managers who doesn't check well the submissions of their participants thats why this kind of act still happening here.

For me, it becomes plagiarism if they copy it word for word without even a hint of paraphrasing and verbatim to make it look like they're the one's who said and also, if they credit themselves and not the original creator of the article or anything that can be plagiarized, it will be considered plagiarism for me.

So what? Do you need to copy everything from the Internet in order for some to become more active? And even more so, to receive merit for someone else's work? Are you out of your mind? I read another topic of yours where you suggested not to add sources of copying from your allegedly other social accounts.
I know what it is about. In the last month, I have reported a lot of copying from Reddit. I just reported to the moderators without writing a report in the meta. And for your information, many of the copied posts from one account were from different sources. That is, based on your rules, one person can have several Reddit accounts?
Therefore, newcomers who come here must respect the rules of the forum. Why should we babysit those unable to read?
I diligently check and report all newbie posts, so don't assume that you can just copy and paste here for your own incomprehensible purposes

It is very important that plagiarism is avoided as much as possible here in the forum may it be accidental or intentional. It does not only destroy your reputation in the forum hence you are also stealing illegally an intellectual property of someone. Even though you are just rephrasing their idea, you should still give credits or citation on what you are getting. I think it is very much essential too that you know how to gather and combine the knowledge you getting from many so that you can simply connect it and make it a whole thought and you can avoid plagiarism at the same time as you build a new thought from many.

For newbies to "watch" those rules and warnings, can a dedicated board be offered where, once a newbie signs up, must be redirected and forced to read the rules and "agree" through clicking a button that they have read and understood the rules of the forum? This way, it will save lots of newbies from getting banned while keeping that section locked "where no posts from members of the forum will be allowed". There are some newbies who don't do it intentionally but some want to earn merits, while others just need their activity to grow, be it in number.

Come, share wisdom at ccFOUND

Nothing wrong with that either as long as you don't overdo it. You always have to keep in mind that some people reject the notion of exams and everything that reminds them of being forced to do something against their will. But a good balance between teaching them the two most essential rules and having them "take exams" to join the forum can certainly be found.

I prefer the quiz idea which has been thrown around a few times. If you wanted you could actually get pretty fancy with it, for example during the quiz you could list the rules simialr to the unofficial guidelines that mprep has written up, and then ask them to copy, and paste the rule which talks about plagiarism into a checkbox to advance, upon doing that you could then give them a pop up, and state plagiarism or copy, and pasting for those unfamiliar with the term is disallowed, and will result in a ban. You could probably do this via a pop up on the screen, while it is allowing, and some people will likely block it, this would be a pretty neat interactive quiz which would educate users a little better.

Members of all ranks have been banned in the past due to plagiarism issues. It's not a problem exclusive to newbies. However, those who have been here long enough are expected to know how things work, so they can't claim they never heard that copy-pasting is bad. New users might not know how serious of an issue it really is and that's why the notifications are supposed to be targeted towards them.

I have been on other non-crypto related forums where you were redirected to the rules after registering an account. There was a countdown of 10-20 or more seconds where you had to stay on the page before you could close it and confirm that you read the rules. You cant force anyone to read what is written, but it's still a nice initiative.   

There is no mistake in plagiarizing the content. It is the person who made the post that made the mistake, because you should not take other people's articles as your credit. This is a basic respect for the original author. But there is no problem at all for you to form your own point of view through learning. For other people's results, mark the citations, sources, or links.

Not really, at least it’s not available publicly. Reports are not typified, so even quantifying by categorization involves a lot of manual work, which I doubt is going to be performed.

There is an old thread on ban appeals (see https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ban-appealupdate-total-table-ban-status-need-feedback-from-global-mods-5144410) which shows many cases appealing due to plagiarism, but the view is completely skewed, since normally only accounts with a certain rank appeal and have an option to reverse the situation (very thin though, it at all).

Bear in mind that plagiarism could crop up at any time, so a Legendary, for example, could be banned now for what he did as a Newbie, if caught.

There are plagiarism problems in every forum, but the rules and censorship of each forum are different.
bitcointalk is the toughest forum I have ever met，Even so, I don’t think the punishment for plagiarism should be reduced

If a person wants to learn from bitcointalk, then even if they are not familiar with the rules, they are blocked because of plagiarism.they can still read posts without registering an account

If they just want to cheat some merits for bounty, then they should be banned

I'm not 100% sure, but I'm really certain that I and a good number of people have made this suggestion already far back in the past. I mean, it really wouldn't hurt to display a small modal with links concerning the rules and plagiarism after a user just created a new account.

Plagiarism is totally a copy and paste of already existing work which everyone is aware of, so members or users that are into plagiarism only think of their upliftment or benefit alone, the reason while majority of them associate into altitude of yours its because they need to be mentioned, known and also make their work to be perfect, so narrating or using it via bitcointalk community here, the objective of uses who indulged in such is to earn a huge merits that will elevate them. So not knowing that plagiarism is not a work of initiative, right now a plagiarism can be called a setback from my principles of understanding of plagiarism.

Nice suggestion. It may not 100% eliminate Plagiarism but still it will give a message to the one who are ignorant.

By the way do we have any data that newbie are the ones who do Plagiarism or higher members of the forum also do the same mistake also ?

Any kind of welcome message would be better than nothing at all. If it were up to me, I would display a notification whenever brand-new and newbie accounts try to post something. That should inform them about two things: plagiarism and spamming. That notification should be visible for either a set number of days or until they reach Jr. Member rank for example.

While it's quite weird for a newbie to ask a super beginner question and then making statements on secure hardware wallets, yes, things like this will almost always be debatable. And it will always be up to the moderator/admin to make the judgement. I assume most of the plagiarism bans are those who pretty much copy-paste a full article anyway, rather than these potentially-unintentional cases.

Fortunately, people can create a temporary alt account for an appeal, and if he/she posted it publicly, I guess people could also state their opinions.

Many new people come to the forum every day and this information might be useful for them. It does not matter if we know it already, there might be someone who does not know it and it helps. Even if this OP post, help one person, its useful. 

More than reputation, it’s one’s stay on the forum, once he is actually discovered, which could even be months or years down the road to the plagiarist’s dismay.

They tend to plagiarize in order to cut corners for one reason or another. Most will likely do it deliberately in order to pass the text as theirs, possibly not aware of the penalty on the forum, but likely with the said intent. There may be others that post something believing that they are being informative, not being aware thay they need to cite the source here.

Perhaps though, there is wiggle room to make it manifestly clear, by including a clear reminder when creating a new post (something along the line of what is mentioned in rule 33 + the example, and emphasizing on referencing the source). This has been commented before on multiple occasions, is seemingly easy to do, and shows some good will to trim the number of cases we recurrently see. Nobody would be able to claim ignorance from there on, which is what we often read.

That's debatable to some point. What could be common knowledge to you, could be brand-new information to someone else.

Imagine this scenario:
A newbie registers a new account on Bitcointalk and starts a thread asking what bitcoin is and what it is good for? That's his first post. In his second post, he writes that same statement you did. The chances of him knowing about hardware wallets and best methods for long-term storage don't look so good if he is struggling with understanding what bitcoin is. It's not impossible that he heard about hardware wallets from some article or a video he saw and he remembers someone say something like that.

If that is the case, did he try to plagiarize and get away with it? Was it maybe unintentional? Is he trying to make it seem like the statement is originally his or does he just have a good memory and remembered the words with no intention to plagiarize? I wouldn't want to be the one making the final decision. 

It would be easier if newbies read the rules before posting but they don't obviously. Its like buying a device and not reading the manual. Mistakes are bound to happen. Same users do not read the terms and conditions before signing up
Thanks! Maybe B&H would be more suitable for this kind of discussion. And yes you're wrong the purpose of this post wasn't to complete post quota.
Then how do you explain the cases of users getting banned. If you strongly believe the thread is useless you could simply just ignore. No need to bump it further

And blah blah blah.  OP, are you trying to get merits here?  All I'm seeing is a bloated post that's going over everything most members of the forum know about, especially those who read threads in Meta.  In addition to that, it'd be better if newbies just read the rules before making their first post.

Why didn't you post this in Beginners & Help?  It would seem more appropriate in that section if you're trying to warn newcomers, but my guess is that your signature campaign doesn't pay for posts in B&H (though I could be wrong).

In any case, pretty much everyone knows what stealing someone else's words means, whether it's paraphrasing, using a text spinner, or doing a simple copy/paste.  There's no need for a thread like this.

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

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

That rule is applied since 2016 and destroys many members or farms. It works. I don't think it should be changed to be softer.

If you join a forum, use a service, use an exchange, and don't read rules, Term of service, you are taking risk.

When you break rules, and restrictions drop on your account, you have to accept it.

You know it's highly unethical trying to copy someone else's work and pass it as your own. No matter what industry you are in, whether you are in scientific research, agriculture, energy industry, or any kind of industry that users write a bunch of stuff. There's already a line and that's creating your own or copying one exact point on it. Unless you are going to point the credits or reference towards the original writer.

It's basically a form of theft. Is it ethical?

There is no reason why someone should need a rule to tell them not to plagiarize. Your argument is akin to saying that people steal because they don't know it is against the law.

This is not a new concept. When writing a post if you are writing something that is not your original thoughts and words, you need to cite the author in some way. The forum does not require citations to be made in any specific way.
I would describe "accidental plagiarism" the same way I would describe someone who claims to have accidentally walked out of Target without paying for something: they did something wrong intentionally and claimed it was an accident when they were caught.

It's all in black and white. If someone knows that they are copy information from someone or somewhere else, then the link to the source of the information is a must, to show that you are not passing the information as your own. There's no in between if you don't want to get your account banned for plagiarism.

This is the problem with many newbies, they are actually plagiarizing but rephrasing, thinking it will not be known. The advice is to write post all off hand, or if using a site, the link should be included.

It has to be indicated that it is translated from certain site with link(s) included, else it is plagiarism that supposed to result to ban.

Accidental probably depends on a few things. Really, the translator should have asked the user or posted a link to the original topic but tbh it's potentially something someone could get away with - or could explain their way out of (especially if the information is deemed useful in an accusatory or appeal topic).

Plagiarism destroys one’s reputation, the penalty is an immediate ban of the user. IMHO many newbies tend to plagiarise because they don't read the rules and guidelines.
“No idea is completely new, only evolving” Many writers get ideas and inspiration from other writers, but you cannot copy a chunk of sentences from another writer word for word without being accused of plagiarism. Paraphrasing doesn't help either. Plagiarism can be accidental or intentional. Example of intentional plagiarism is when a post is written in one language is rewritten in another and posted in local board without citing the original poster. I don’t quite know where the forum stands on accidental plagiarism. When newbies ( I use newbies as a case study because I believe they are more likely to plagiarise although I do not have the stats to prove that) are interested in a particular topic they gather all sorts of information, this may eventually cause problems distinguishing between common knowledge, facts and information that needs citation.