[WikiEN-l] The dangers of not citing Wikipedia

[Thomas Dalton]

> You mean you may run into some power tripping professors. There isn't
> much to be done about that problem.

Without seeing the paper in question, it's impossible to judge. We
don't know how large the apparently small bits that were copied word
for word were and we don't know exactly what "paraphrase" means -
changing the odd word and rearranging the sentences a bit could
qualify as paraphrasing (I would call it copying, but the student in
question isn't me), but wouldn't be enough for it to be acceptable to
not cite it as coming from Wikipedia (and as a source for a quotation,
not just as a source of information).

Also, he says he cited Wikipedia on some parts. If you have inline
citations to a source then you're implying that anything not
specifically stated as coming from that source didn't do so. If you
don't want to cite everything individually, then you need to cite it
as a more general reference (which isn't good practise, of course).