While reading an article the other day, I just started googling some random phrases off of it and was stunned with the results. I could find the entire phrases in another source and that was not even mentioned in the article I was reading. A brief search for plagiarism will reveal that it’s such a big deal so much so that people have form companies selling plagiarism detection software. A brief message exchanges on twitter also revealed some interesting points.
Plagiarism in written material is harder to detect unless you have read the original article/book etc… It’s a whole different scenario when it comes to web publishing. Anyone can search a vast repository of published content and detect phrases copied from other sources in just seconds. It’s common in academic institutions. But it’s disgusting when grownups just copy paste shit from the internet and publish under their own name. If you’re such a mindless moron, please do spend two minutes to rephrase your sentence in a different way giving the same meaning.
I can understand someone getting carried away with Google and Wikipedia and suddenly claiming to be an expert on anything imaginable. I don’t have a problem if someone is making a living off Google and Wikipedia, they should at least have the decency of mentioning the source where they read it. Or Ctrl-C Ctrl-Ved it. Whichever applicable.
if you use stumbleupon, you will stumble across many pages that appear to have content simliar to other pages you have stumbled across already. If you visit 10 SEO sites, you generally find the same thing being said on all ten and non of it has any substance.
@raditha: <grins> Now at least I know I’m not the only one who felt the same thing after reading about a dozen articles on that a few months ago.