[WikiEN-l] On Plagiarism

[Vicki Rosenzweig]

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 at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org