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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   28676 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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I see "plagiarism" as something more like traveling in basketball, where mostly everyone would agree taking five dribbleless steps while running in action is less forgivable than taking three while walking the ball up the court in the beginning of a possession. Especially when examining casual players, most basketball-familiar people can identify traveling when they see it (like pornography) and judge its severity even if complications like jump steps, floating dribbles, and step-throughs can appear.

Lifting entire passages without attribution would be like the five dribbleless steps mid-action; insufficiently rewording some well-known-in-the-field information in a sentence or two would be like the three steps while walking up the court.

To continue the metaphor, I think the current cycle of feud and violence is going to look like this: imagine if the NBA sat down at the end of the season and identified travels in video of every game, and docked the team "convicted" of the travel points that the league determined resulted from the travel, and if the docked points were enough they started revoking wins. Imagine they started with the Lakers, and docked the Lakers several wins. Well then Lakers fans would naturally go through every other team's games, and point out uncalled travels, and pretty soon the results of any close game are in question.

Combine this with the tendency of twitter to report "Eleven instances of plagiarism have been found in the work of Dr. X" and you get a pretty toxic stew.

I agree with you that context is everything, I'm not arguing that plagiarism is everywhere in the sense that no one has original ideas. I'm arguing that a motivated reader can locate a possible accusation of plagiarism in almost any work, which will then be fed to the slaughterhouse of social media.

Well then Lakers fans would naturally go through every other team's games

Joke's on them, there is effectively no other team in academia.

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