Comments | stop_plagiarism: The <strong class="lj-user"><a href="/read/user/spikess">spikess</a></strong>/Empress Galaxia case poll

bogwitch in stop_plagiarism

The spikess/Empress Galaxia case poll

Feb 26, 2005 15:07

There appears to be a split in consensus regarding the decision this community should make in this case. In the interest of fairness, and to take some of the pressure off the moderators, it was decided that a poll might be the best way forward regarding this issue.

Poll The brynspikess/Empress Galaxia case

2005, mod: bogwitch, admin

Comments 19

zyrya February 26 2005, 15:40:16 UTC

I'm still humming and hawing over this because spikess blatantly plagiarised at least two stories and made some attempt to cover it up by claiming she was given permission by the original authors when in fact she hadn't even asked them until prompted to do so. But I voted B because she seems to understand that this was wrong, and has been very accommodating with our process. Maybe we need a category C ... guilty of plagiarism, but given some leeway for good behaviour?

(Is anyone else having trouble with all this Seriousness? I'm going to read speakr2customrs's latest as an antidote.)

bogwitch February 26 2005, 15:42:15 UTC

The watch list does give details of why the person is on that list. That might be enough.

zyrya February 26 2005, 15:50:55 UTC

That does help.

Ees deeficult, yes? Because, as you said earlier, we're not actually a court ... just a self-appointed monitoring community. But I guess if we're not going to take it seriously then we shouldn't even bother trying.

I do hope that polls won't be a regular feature, especially in clear-cut cases. Some LJ writers can muster large herds of supporters no matter what sins they've committed in the fandom, and I'd hate to see the community mods held to a rigged vote. Numbers are powerful things.

bogwitch February 26 2005, 17:08:15 UTC

Yeah. I hadn't thought of rigging. I'm not that cunning obviously.

I suggested it because it was a burden on quinara to have to wiegh up all these opinions herself.

Thread 5

fishsanwitt February 26 2005, 16:13:40 UTC

I was going to vote for outright banning until I read the 'watch' choice. Maybe everyone who 'votes' needs to also explain the 'why' - would that help re: rigged votes? Just a thought.

bogwitch February 26 2005, 17:09:50 UTC

Perhaps if we do another we should take that into account and see if we can build in some sort of filter to weed out potential rigging.

(The comment has been removed)

bogwitch February 26 2005, 18:10:37 UTC

"Convicted" is the language used on the community info page, I'm just following that!

(The comment has been removed)

bogwitch February 26 2005, 18:29:31 UTC

Okay, I'll let you off. :)

spikewriter February 26 2005, 19:40:30 UTC

I haven't had time to comment because of RL things, but I have been following it. I voted for the watch list on this one because it isn't a clear-cut case.

I'm unhappy with the idea of not asking for permission prior to posting -- if it had been one of my stories, there would little pieces of her all over the internet at this point. (What can I say? I'm a Scorpio.) However, she seems to have at least realized she that she screwed up and is willing to admit it.

It goes back to the fact that there is still a lot of education that needs to be done -- people don't seem to understand where the boundaries are.

bogwitch February 26 2005, 23:40:51 UTC

The problem is reaching the kind of people who are likely to do it.

dancetomato February 26 2005, 20:42:38 UTC

While I voted to place spikess to the watch list, I would like it if there were a time limit set. She has cooperated fully and it is not clear that her intentions were to plagerize.

Dea has written a great deal of original fic that is not in question. I would not like to see a writer have her body of work destroyed because of one error in judgement. The watch list is appropriate, but will she be followed by that forever? Or just as long as it takes to raise awareness of this type of "covering" a fic without permission is plagerism, show Dea's good faith effort to make amends and demonstrate that she will not repeat the same error?

Thank you for your hard work on this.

dancetomato February 26 2005, 20:44:02 UTC

p.s. All this has made me so paranoid that I might plagiarize without knowing it. See? *points to comment above* I can't even spell the word plagiarism.

liz_marcs February 27 2005, 02:02:55 UTC

As a side note (since I've dealt with RL plagiarism in the past): It's not uncommon for writers to have similar ideas. I admit that due to RL circumstances I'm *cough* oversensitive to the issue to the point where I've been known to stop reading fanfiction entirely while working on a story to make sure I'm not accidentally borrowing an idea ( ... )