[WikiEN-l] On Plagiarism

[Fred Bauder]

>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