Well, I have just come across my first case of Wikipedia
plagiarism. Someone just turned in an extra-credit research
paper on the legality and morality of abortion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality_and_legality_of_abortion
They simply cut-and-pasted the entire article, including
bulet points and "Related articles", added their own
introduction paragraph, and their own conclusion paragraph.
I dealt with this in accord with my school's plagiarism
policy - and a lot of leeway - since the student in
question really did not understand the difference between
plagiarism and writing one's own paper. Sadly, a huge
amount of NYC inner-city high school student are literally
writing at a fourth or fifth grade level, and show zero
awareness of issues such as plagiarism and copyright
infringement.
From my conversations with middle-school teachers (and
reading articles in teaching journals) it is an unwritten
policy in NYC schools that children are automatically
promoted to the next grade as long as they have good
attendance and behave in class. The result of this
pseudo-liberal(*) attitude is that we have high schools
full of illiterate kids who can't read, can't write, and
think that "handing a paper in" is truly what matters, even
if they did not write it themselves.
Currently, I am trying to deal with this issue by giving a
copy of the following paper to all of my students, and
having a day discussing this topic.
Plagiarism: What It is and How to Recognize and Avoid It
http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/pamphlets/plagiarism.shtml
Obviously, a high school science shouldn't have to do this;
we should be teaching science. But in practice most of our
students have been failed by their family, their community
and many of their previous teachers; they come to us
ignorant of what a well-schooled sixth grader should know
by heart. (Some high-schoolers, in fact, are on a
third-grade reading level.) We thus need to spend time
teaching them things that others did not.
Lately I have been seeing more and more borderline
plagiarism taking place in homework assignments, and the
text is often coming from sites that have copied Wikipedia
content. Have others here seen this problem?
I understand that Wikipedia is not at all responsible for
someone's plagiarism or copyright infringement; however I
was thinking that we should have an article on the subject
that we could use as a handout. Our Plagiarism article is a
good start.
Robert (RK)
(*) I say pseudo-liberal, because these policies do not
represent actual progressive educational policies. Actual
progressive educational policies help students learn; the
status quo, however, grossly lowers the bar for passing to
give the illusion of progress, which hurts the students and
eventually their community.
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Check out the new Yahoo! Front Page.
www.yahoo.com