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Discussion on: Inspiration vs. Plagiarism

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fnh profile image
Fabian Holzer

So what can you do to not trip and fall into plagiarism?

That is actually very easy: since there is no such thing as unintentional plagiarism, you simply cannot trip and fall into it.

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missamarakay profile image
Amara Graham

100% agree with you.

I typed that question with dripping sarcasm.

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

You can be unintentionally misleading - for instance you can show a selection of work where you did maybe 10% of the items, and when you edit the video (which is often not done in a linear fashion) you can make it sound like you created all of them with a casual snip of something you didn't feel was critical.

It's like having a section of code that was taken from somewhere else in a project, somewhere you thought was written by a colleague because you didn't scroll to the top of their 4000-line file and see the comment saying it was GPL.

It's not entirely impossible to make a mistake, especially with other things on your mind, but - just like with code - we should read it over once done and show it to someone else for a quick peer review.

And if you do screw up, the honest thing to do is admit it and apologise!

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missamarakay profile image
Amara Graham

Thanks for chiming in here. I think in terms of writing a paper and walking through your steps and process, its too easy to not give credit to the people before you. But in this case, sections of the paper are almost verbatim and terminology is put through a weird synonym generation. That feels very intentional to me.

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

Yeah, I agree totally with your post; I'm just conscious that there are likely a percentage of people out there who have "plagiarised" content who would be mortified to realise it, and feel the previous comment was a little too black-and-white.