Plagiarism - Please don’t do it!

Question

Without dropping anyone in it, I would like to ask members (not just newbies) to take care when using info found on other sites.

Please do not do the following things

1. Copy and paste entire articles, instead use a small snippet of the article and link to the full article.

2. Change one or two words and then use the rest of the article as is.

3. Take complete  blurbs from family trees that do not have sources.

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I am sure others will have something to say, and maybe suggest better things. I am not legally trained, what little I have learnt is from working on another website (not genealogy).

Answer 1

This may be an interesting read (from WikiTree's own Help pages):

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Copying_Text

and also this, about copying from Wikipedia:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Copying_from_Wikipedia

Comments

Thanks Ros, thought I would raise it again as I am seeing it again and again. I realise people want to put everything on their profiles, but they need to give credit where credit is due.

Answer 2

I have had cause to worry about a form of copying from elsewhere that probably is not a violation of copyright, but problematic nevertheless. Since only the info for the data fields and the linking between family members is copied it presumably avoids the copyright issue - but creates literally thousands of profiles without biography or real sources.

Asked a question about it yesterday: https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/776652/a-question-of-quantity-versus-quality

Unfortunately the people who do these sorts of things will probably not be the kind that reads G2G.

Comments

thanks Eva

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Eva, the last sentence in your comment about " people who do these sorts of things"  not neing the kind of people who would read G2G.  Is really not an a very nice comment.  Not everyone is aware of what plagiarism is.  Not everyone does it intentionally.  It is not ok to slam other members even in a back handed way.

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Trudy, I would consider Eva's point a valid one. I don't think she's trying to be mean, she's just stating a simple fact.  

The casual genealogist is probably more willing to do cut & paste without verifying the facts or realizing excessive use is indeed called plagiarism, and the casual genealogist is also less likely to spend time reading G2G.  So to reach that demographic, we may need to think of other ways of reaching out to them.

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R. Neff,   I am a " casual genealogist.  I have spent a great deal of time reading G2G.  I do not " copy and paste".  I have not engaged in plagiarism since the 5th grade. I have spent thousands of hours researching one ancestor.

Since I am the " them" in that demographic one of the ways to reach out to us might be to cut back on the massive amounts of hoops one has to jump through to use this site. And stop the " us and them"  attitude.

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Perhaps it could be modified by Eva to say "some of the people . . ." or "some of those who . . ." therefore still saying the same thing, but in a gentler (less accusatory?) way.  (I don't think Eva's first language is English, so what may seem inoffensive in one way, may not be so in straight-out English.)

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Well said Melanie!

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Trudy... um, if you have spent thousands of hours researching, then you are not what I would call a casual genealogist.  It might be a hobby for you, but it's still one you take seriously. That is leaps and bounds beyond many.

Regardless, we still haven't addressed the core question here: how to get the non-plagiarism message to the <insert non-offensive adjective here> people that don't frequent G2G.

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I know English is not Eva's native language, neither is it mine, we are both born in Sweden.

If we, who do not have English as a native tongue, would have to really consider each and every word we write, then there would be very few outside the English speaking countries making contributions to G2G.

Perhaps the solution is to only answer in Swedish and let anyone interested enough to know what we are saying use a translation service/program, that way we won't offend anyone by choosing the wrong words or putting together a sentence the wrong way.

Edited spelling.

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Perhaps the solution is to only answer in Swedish and let anyone interested enough to know what we are saying use a translation service/program, that way we won't offend anyone by choosing the wrong words or putting together a sentence the wrong way.

commented by Maggie Andersson

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As sure as you need to break eggs in order to make an omelette, there would still be someone who would get their knickers in a knot. 

(And you'd be forcing me to use interglot a lot more than I do now!   (Because I would be interested in what you had to say.))

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Don't worry about it Maggie.  

Your English is great (as was the original post). There was a person who read more into it than most, and didn't see the great irony in being rather unwelcoming while accusing others of being unwelcoming.  We should all feel welcome here.

Hopefully we can all just put this minor misunderstanding behind us now and get back to more productive things.

Answer 3

Marion, are you  looking at information on the Harneds?  Because I ran into those same scenarios in recent days on that line.The funny thing was that the website that was quoted has a disavowal of the accuracy of the information right on the front page.

It may be that people are confusing copyrights with plagiarism - they have nothing to do with each other. If you are quoting Hammurabi or Sun Tzu, you must attribute the quote, no matter how old the source.. They are not your words! This is not difficult - I learned it in 4th grade, when I wrote my first book report.

My opinion is that listing the book/article/website in Sources does not mean that you can skip the attribution. The Sources area shows where you got your information, not where you lifted the biography from.

As far as using an outside website for  information: without sources that you can check and replicate, that website is no different from a family tree from Ancestry.com or Family Search - unreliable (I am sure that there are reliable, sourced trees on those sites; however, most of them contain a lot of wishful thinking and errors that have taken on a life of their own).

Comments

Thank you for bringing this up, Joan. The two concepts are different. Plagiarism is an ethical concept and copyright is a legal construct (with an ethical component). Related but different. Plagiarism is passing off someone else's words as your own and copyright violations are, while unethical, a form of theft.

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I think if you indicate the author of the article, then it is not plagiarism, since you give a link to him