On 7/19/05, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
Plagiarism is use of paraphrased or quoted material without acknowledgment of the source. We welcome and expect paraphrasing, which is simply use of information. As you note, we have failed to make an explicit policy regarding plagiarism, which should be done so confabulation of plagiarism and copyright violations does not occur.
Sometimes sources of information are limited, or the information itself is limited and there are only so many ways to paraphrase it. But plagiarism is easy in this age of cut and paste and we need to guard against it as WP becomes ever more widely accepted, because the authors of original material will doubtless turn to WP to see what we have to say on their specialist topic, and if they see their own words quoted without attribution, then they are: A) not going to be happy and B) dismissive of WP as a whole.
WP isn't a mainstream encyclopaedia and we editors aren't a select club (except by self-selection), so may I suggest that instead of cutting and pasting at worst or paraphrasing at best, we make it policy to ask third-party authors if they would like to contribute to an article?
My feeling is that if they have gone to the trouble of researching a subject and writing something that we feel is good enough for inclusion, then they would be honoured by a request to contribute directly, and they would make a better contribution on a specialist topic than anything we "generalists" could do by paraphrasing.