Finding apparent footnote annotation in bios, with no corresponding note

Question

Perusing bios of my ancestors I have come across many sentences with a number at the end. These appear to be footnotes, but not in superscript. However, they lead to nothing. I've contemplated editing them out, but as I suspect these are big fat clues that the bio is plagiarized, not sure what to do, if anything.

Answer 1

I would agree that they are probably big fat clues to copy/pasted material from somewhere. Copy maybe three or four dozen words, then paste them into the google search engine. This will usually point you to exactly where they came from. Then you can either rewrite the whole thing (look at the sources they used) or at the very least you can put quotes around the whole thing and properly attribute the original. First option is preferred.

Comments

When you copy/paste a section of text that has superscript footnote numbers, those numbers are usually converted to plain text - if they were originally links then they are no longer "hot" and the superscript appearance has been lost.  That's the dead giveaway that you used, and Anne confirmed, as the clue for the evolution of the material.

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I have noticed that when people copy from Wikipedia, the footnote numbers are still there, but as Gaile said, they are no longer hot links. So my first guess would be the text may have been copied from Wikipedia.

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Shirley, It's more a question of where you paste TO than where you copied FROM that determines the format of what you're pasting.  When you paste anything into the bio section, that is a text box - STRICTLY text is the only thing that is stored there, so any formatting of what you copied will be lost.

On the other hand, f you copy something from a web page and paste it into - for example - Microsoft Word then all formatting will come with it, including things like font faces/sizes/colors, and also hypertext (links will still be links and they will link to whatever they originally did).

I still agree with your guess of Wikipedia as the most likely source of the material, mainly because that's such a commonly utilized source here on WikiTree.