Topic: Unintentional plagiarism (Read 532 times)

You may misjudge how people will report post for deletion. In addition to the quality of post that do not meet quality standard, repeated, off-topic or plagiarism post are some of the thing that other users will report for removal by moderator. I never thought that someone would report a random post without reading anything the poster wrote for deletion and if they did then the moderator would also check the post before acting.

OP, however intentional or unintentional plagiarism will also be considered a violation which can be strictly enforced by moderators. It is still possible to get waivers if the user is a good contributor while on the forum and for any purpose plagiarism then I think it should be avoided. Be a good user and follow all the rule, you will enjoy it.

Plagiarism is an act of stealing intellectual property from someone and it can never be justified by any reasons. You should be responsible on creating your own thoughts and make sure that if ever you will mention some of their words, it is properly cited in order to avoid plagiarism. In the forum, there will be instances wherein even though you are genuinely certain that you did not imitate others idea, your post will still be deleted or reported. It is at some point hard to make up an idea that originated from you completely cause most of the things we post comes from other people's collaborated idea and expressed by us based on how we understood it.

Lucius hit the nail on the head. Posting something and pretending it's yours, is plagiarism. The rest is not. (Which doesn't mean that the rest might not be violating some other rule.)

There is however no difference between countries. Plagiarism is plagiarism and the definition of plagiarism does not change if you're in an other country.

Surely some countries have laws or no laws or flexible laws or unenforceable laws or whatever terminology fits you to try to act as if you didn't know you were breaking the rules. But even if your country doesn't punish plagiarism, the definition of plagiarism is VERY clear.

Because if you don't know the definition of plagiarism, then how can you tell your country is flexible towards plagiarism?


So I'd suggest everyone to quit the useless pseudo intellectual discussions about countries, cultures and definitions, and to get to the point:

1. you copy-paste something that's clearly not yours: a photo of Brad Pitt or Britney Spears? An article from the New York Times or Yahoo Finance? A Youtube clip of Michael Jackson's Billie Jean? If it's clearly not yours, it is common policy to post a source, and if you don't, it's generally frowned upon. You should do this especially for written posts and articles, because in general it's less evident that the post is a copypaste.
(for instance, in the case of images, virtually 99% of all photos posted on this forum are considered non-plagiarizing copypasting, and most of the time quoting a source is not necessary, simply because it is so obvious that you are not the original author of that content)
>> this is not plagiarism, but this doesn't mean your post doesn't violate any other forum rules like zero value, burstposting, spamming etc.


2. you copy-paste someone else's work and pretend it to be yours: this is plagiarism. By definition it's intentional. "Unintentional plagiarism" does not exist and is a contradictio in terminis. Your intent has to be proven and this explains why mods are very careful before (temp-)banning someone for plagiarism.


Sure, there may be differences between individual countries' legal approach, flexibility and punishment of plagiarism, but there is no difference in the definition of plagiarism. Therefore, your culture, country or origin never counts as an excuse or a justification for plagiarism.

Rightly pointed out sir.
This is the greatest factor affecting or influencing plagiarism in the forum. Maybe in different countries is is a serious offence, while some other countries it is close to a habit because of very flexible and unenforceable laws guiding it

Plagiarism is, in principle, a bad and dishonest way for someone to appropriate someone else's opinion and present it as their own. This happens in real life on a daily basis, and I am aware of many public cases where prominent politicians in their master’s theses have literally plagiarized more than 50% of the content. If this is done by adults in much more serious situations, then we should not be surprised that many young people (some probable minors) do not realize that plagiarism is actually the theft of someone else's intellectual property - and any theft should basically be something bad.

I believe that there are big differences between people from different parts of the world regarding the perception of plagiarism - home and school education play a big role here. But regardless of these differences, anyone who becomes a member of the forum has the same conditions not to make such a mistake - all you need to do is read the rules of the forum.

Plagiarism is plagiarism, plagiarism in Bitcointalk forum is an offence. If a user plagiarized intentionally or unintentionally that user will face the law of the forum because the forum has always made it clear to it members that plagiarism is a big offence.

Theymos mentioned that each and every plagiarism case will be handled individually, so if someone commits plagiarism before 5 years and their accounts got reported today for permanent ban then they maybe taken into consideration about their presence here does made any changes and something like that.

Plagiarism is the most meaningless thing. If someone plagiarizes other people's works to show his knowledge, he will obviously fail.

In my opinion, unintentional plagiarism is the same as unprovoked plagiarism. Unintentional is not an excuse for laziness in quoting. The title treatment here is the best treatment for everyone.

So in essence even if the forum have some measures of pardon to higher rank members with good reputation the user will still get his/her punishment with possible signature ban for a timeframe, this still bowl down to the truth that bitcointalk have zero space for plagiarism no matter how minimal or unintentionally the plagiarism is committed.

Not exactly a squeaky clean second chance, but historically, accounts with a certain degree of rank on the forum, and possibly the more reputed the better, have got to keep their account, but had to withstand a signature ban for a period of time, often within the one to two year range.

In addition, the actual act, the moment it was performed, and its recurrence will bear a saying in the final outcome. If it was a reiterative habit (perhaps even more than once), the chances will probably narrow down to that of a Quark.

This thread used to keep track of some appeals with such an outcome:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ban-appealupdate-total-table-ban-status-need-feedback-from-global-mods-5144410

Newer ranked accounts, and lower ranked accounts probably stand close to no chances, lacking a backlog of posts to counter on the balance as a net positive account for the forum.

Sir, do you mean that if one has a decent posting history, and eventually caught up by plagiarism, there is likelihood that he/she would be forgiven?
If yes, how often or how many times would the user get the second chance?

Not surprised to hear that and your country isn't the only one experiencing this. Like I said earlier, the morals in the society has been long lost. People don't care anymore, things aren't the way it used to be when everyone hustled before they achieve their successes, today that can be easily bought or cheated on. My country is also guilty of this, the project which are given to undergraduate before completing their university degrees was a thing of honor in the earlier days but today 99.9% of university graduate just copied their projects form online.

We now have website where the previous projects completed by previous graduate are been kept (are been posted, and sometimes sold) and if you are given similar or exact topic to work on, you just have to go copy then change few world, submit and you'll pass. Undergraduate don't go researching anymore they just plagiarized and get awarded with colleges/university degrees.

When individual like this comes into the forum what do you expect, they already have the mindset set by the society that things like giving credits to owner of works been used or setting out time to create yours aren't important anymore. They look for the easiest way out and that's by coping others works, posing it as their and hoping to be awarded (merited).

Whoa, story time? Dis gonna be gud.


Exactly, enjoying your own success is something hard to come by as long as you put your effort in it

Now I feel old, missed those days of studying hahaha

Welp and good thing he's a former one, cause I ain't gonna be part of his copy-pasta craps.

They are very much likely to be banned than not (if and when they get reported). Although context can sometimes be derived, and posting history taken into account, I’d say that the vast majority of plagiarism is performed by lower ranks (or when accounts were lower ranks), when the accounts normally don’t have that much of a history to go by.

Probably quoting copied text is the better visual cue to use, since it makes it clearer that the intention is to bring to the post something not written by the poster. In any case, adding the reference link goes a long way if one is not capable of simply reading and expressing things with their own words.

OP mentioned a situation with a wrong source/source link. I guess that can qualify as unintentional plagiarism. I don't believe someone who gave wrong sources for their quotes or did not quote all copied texts, only some of them, would be banned on this forum.


He never knows when it will come back to bite him. There was a case of a guy in my country who plagiarised his master thesis and it came out 20 year later when he became an MP.

We always have that one friend. During assignments, he would copy some off his classmates and paraphrase the rest.

Surprisingly, never got caught.

To be honest, it does not happen only here in the forum. Not sure about other schools around the world but here in my country, they don't teach that like thoroughly.

I remember back in my high school days when one of my former friends just decided to speedrun their essays by copy-pasting from random articles online and they just tend to get away with it. Oh and yeah, he got A for that. Freaking A from a work with no effort. I was naive that time that is why I can't talk about it.

It's very disheartening how it happens. That is why I'm most times surprised  when people say they don't know that plagiarism is an offence. I'll begin to wonder if there has been a time plagiarism wasn't an offence.

Call a spade a spade, if you plagiarized you just commit a punishable offence on the platform, nothing like intentional or unintentional plagiarism, that's why you could state or quote with reference, meaning you acknowledged the source that not directly from you but you admit and go inline by, just as you can't buy a car and claim you produce it, the reference has to go to the brand name.