Plagiarism: the scourge of writers everywhere

Plagiarism is a crime; it’s also more common than we like to think, especially online. When I was a kid in school, I only had a vague concept of what plagiarism was, consequently overstepping the mark in countless projects where I simply reworded encyclopaedia entries. I’m fairly certain that I’m not alone. Now that I’m older and write for a living, I like to think that I know better, but in truth I probably still cross the line. Hopefully the occasions are few and far between.

There are many websites devoted to the plagiarism phenomenon. One of these, plagiarism.org, says that plagiarism includes the following practices:

• Passing someone else’s work off as your own

• Indiscriminate copying without giving credit where it’s due
• Rewording sentences while retaining the basic sentence structure

• Using so much of someone else’s text that it makes up the bulk of your work, regardless of citations

I just reworded some of the points given in the website, did I commit plagiarism? I certainly hope not. I’m not trying to pass it off as original work because I cited my reference and it only constitutes a small part of my text, so I should escape the attention of the literary police. But maybe you’re starting to see that the waters are murkier than we would ideally like them to be.

The internet, fantastic tool that it is, makes it very easy to commit plagiarism. There is so much information available that no one is going to notice if you sneak a paragraph here and there. What are the chances that the original authors are going to notice? I’d say they’re pretty slim, provided you don’t accidentally go viral. But what happens if you are caught out and the original author comes knocking at your virtual door?

Brennan White, from PandemicBlog thought that he had caught a plagiarist red-handed when he spotted a popular blog post that was almost identical to one that PandemicBlog had published less than a month before. The author of the new (slightly contested) post had even commented on the original. So he did what many of us would have done, and left a comment of his own. He says that the reply was enough to convince him that the author came by his idea honestly and that any similarity in the posts was unintentional. How many of us would have been as forgiving?

White then goes on to raise some interesting questions about the changing face of plagiarism online. For instance, given the incredible number of blogs in the world (White says that there are over 60 million), and the fact that so many people are writing about the same topics, is plagiarism unavoidable? Is it possible, as the author of White’s contested blog post claims, to think about and write on a subject in such a way that it’s almost identical to another, right down to sentence structure and paragraph layout?

I would say that it’s possible (isn’t anything possible in this world?), but not probable. The number of coincidences necessary to result in that situation would be staggering, and I have difficulty with blindly believing that it’s possible. If it looks like a fish and swims like a fish, it’s fishy, too fishy for me.

We put information on the net so that others can use it. That’s the nature of the World Wide Web, what it’s there for. It’s just good manners to tell people where you got your information from. After all, you probably wouldn’t like it if some shmo came along and used your sweat and blood to further his or her career, would you?

Recommended sites:

http://pandemiclabs.com/pandemicblog/2008/03/the-issue-of-plagiarism-in-social-media/

http://www.plagiarism.org/learning_center/what_is_plagiarism.html

Sandra wrote this article for the online marketers MediaVision Interactive ZA SEO marketers leading SEO marketers and experts in the field of search.