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."
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."'
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.
Fred