Community business

[abomvubuso]

Hi all. I'm sorry that i'm going to diverge from the talking-politics(TM) and occupy you with this again, but i think its a matter that needs to be addressed, and this time properly. I'm afraid last time we didnt exhaust the issue as we should and problems remained between members; unfortunately, the two guys who should've been most inolved in the

Comments

[sealwhiskers]

Okay, here is part of an exchange with gunslnger that gives one aspect of why I think some haughty angles of accusation are exaggerated:

http://talk-politics.livejournal.com/1060267.html?thread=84733355#t84733355

(sorry, but I get exhausted to say the same things in multiple threads)

Now, larger parts of copy/pasting without naming source would actually *be* what could cause the real problem for the community, it could possibly lead to copyright infringement.

Plagiarism is very hard to define otherwise by law, and in the case of some of these articles the mods link to, they haven't done anything much worse than Crane and Matten (for instance) themselves did. Newsblogs and discussion forums on the net re-write and make a form of "information pie" for people to discuss. in large parts because they want to incorporate their owns stuff too and also links to explanations of their own etc etc. There are various reasons for this, and when there is no journalistic or monetary gain to get from these summaries, it is in fact very hard to call it plagiarism.

My knowledge in this will continue to be that this wasn't a huge deal and wasn't made in any way to "gain" anything. For instance, what cretin would think that Abomvobuso had made an interview with Khattar Abou Diab and then re-written it into prose? The re-writing is in all these cases (as in numerous news blogs for instance) to tell a story more smoothly and to not get accused of copyright infringement.

Hence I said, in a previous post, to one of Anosognosia's buddies, that I don't believe for a second that we have "culprits" or criminal intent in T_P.

I believe that when it comes to plagiarism outside of academia (for instance the arts and informal news-sharing on the net) people in general do not understand how often news articles copy each other's content and just change the formula slightly or how contingent the whole business with informal summaries on the web are. Often, when it is re-written text not used for money and not copyright infringement, it is not considered illegal.

I am one of those who didn't think this such a "big matter", except from a destructive to the community point of view. Among other things because some of the texts mahmut and Abom were using, were themselves re-written from other original sources. (Crane and Matten for instance)

But people will throw the rocks and I've already been paraphrased wrongly as being too flippant about stuff.

Ironic thing is, I really do know a lot about plagiarism..but the 2 mods in question don't want to be defended and want this situation to heal, so I'm just trying to hold my tongue when some people go on tangents that IMO are pretty ridiculous.