At 08:00 AM 5/31/03 -0600, you wrote:
From a recent
New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/31/books/31BOMB.html?tntemail1
'The Naval Academy's history department, in its guidelines on plagiarism,
states that citations "must clearly and explicitly guide the reader to the
sources used" and that writers must indicate "all use of another's words,
even if they constitute only part of a sentence, with quotation marks and
specific citation."
Those are standards for footnoting term papers; interesting, but not what
we're doing.
A statement on plagiarism that is posted on the Web
site of the American
Historical Association states that a historian "should never simply borrow
and rephrase the findings of other scholars" and that "the clearest abuse is
the use of another's language without quotation marks and citation."'
And we *really* aren't writing academic papers or books that claim to be
original research. In fact, if it's original research, it doesn't belong in the
Wikipedia.
Yes, if I were to write an article that was, basically, Historian A's theory
about Event B, I would give credit. But that's not a likely Wikipedia topic.
More likely, an article about Event B might include a paragraph that
began "So-and-so's theory..." or "According to So-and-so", and
then
have something in the links section.
So what standard should we follow?
Should we be using footnotes in all articles in such instances?
I should confess that I have used considerable "rephrasing" from time to
time in my Wikipedia articles. That avoids copyright violation but not
plagarism as defined above.
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr(a)redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org