[WikiEN-l] On Plagiarism

[Daniel Ehrenberg]

Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> 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."

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

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Plagerism, defined as any use of information without explicit credit, is prohibited by the vague concept of academinc honesty. Doing what is listed above is pure copywrite violation or copying of PD resources without credit. Wikipedia is already against that. For example, all of the articles that even had parts based on the CIA world factbook at one time have (or are supposed to have) boilerplate text notices on them, despite the fact that the CIA doesn't even request it. Same with the 1911 britannica and FOLDOC. I don't think the policy would be any different for other resources.
—LittleDan


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