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.
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