This blog is for the 133 out of 2691 in the poll who have not understood the rules, and for those who have added a question as comment to the poll
and for all others who may not have read the rules yet and may not understand it either. And for all who are just curious what I have to say.
Oh my dear readers, even having these rules in place since late in November - and they are actually not really new, just a bit rephrased - every day a moderator still feels like Don Quixote in his fight against those 133 windmills which seem to be active all day and night.
Is plagiarism new?
I never thought about the word before, I had no Latin in school, I just learned from Wikipedia's article about Plagiarism that it means kidnapping, a Poet kidnapped the verses from another Poet. Remembers me somehow on the SCN coffee corner blogs which are one reason that this topic became so elaborated in the RoE.
Chance mistaken. Could have been a German word. But the early German moderators 
were so strong that not even the word survived. It must have been a hard time for all those cave painters without own ideas.
In the Middle Ages thousands of monks copied books, but this was not plagiarism, without their doing the knowledge could not be obtained and spread. There was no Internet to get the original from wherever you are. And Brother Tuck did not paint his name on the cover of The Iliad, the credit was still with Homer, even he was already more years dead than he spend alive.
Plagiarism is more an ethic than a legal thing, but in any case something what we do not want in SCN. If someone just copies content from SAP's help.sap.com and posts it as blog or document or just as own answer to a discussion then this is morally corrupt.
The positive thing we get to know from that is: there is a guy (or girl) who knows? how to find the good things in the web. And he/she wants to become a mother soon and is already testing spoon feeding. However, in SCN has a MoM a higher reputation than a mother.
Trust me, it is quite easy to identify copied content. My browser has already an app for that. I only need to mark a part of a sentence, an entire sentence, or even the end of one sentence and the beginning of another sentence, do a right mouse click to search for it with Google. Believe me, it is less effort for me to find the source than for the cheater to create a document in SCN. Still I would like to avoid this game at all, as it has no winner. It creates a lot trouble, takes the time away from the moderators to create valuable content in SCN and the cheater loses the points, the badges, the user ID, the reputation, eventually even outside SCN, and this can hurt like a blow with a club from my stone age idol.
But when does a moderator start thinking (yes we can) that something could be plagiarized? If someone posts answers in a broken English with a lot errors like: How much quanity you are trying to Post the Inovice. May be you are given more than wrong. and this person is then bringing a document in fluent English. This is actually bringing back my hunting instincts. There is certainly more what triggers this sense, but I don't want to educate the cheaters to avoid such mistakes.
The better way is to be original, be yourself, use your own writing style, like many said in the comments to the poll, just representative for many others I am quoting rohidas.sap to keep it alive as a good source of information.
Actually I am at the end of this blog. When I started this morning, before I learned about the history of plagiarism, I had a story in my mind which I would like to use as a hanger for this blog: A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage from Mark Twain. He wrote about a person who came to a prairie village and accused Jules Verne as plagiarist. (Mark Twain envied Jules Verne, because he could live from his writing)
And I would never know about this story if there was no copyright violater, because I actually got it as audio book from YouTube. But in moment I wanted to give credit I just got this:
It means the account of the poster got disabled.
You see, SCN is not the only place where plagiarism and copyright violation is subject to penalties.
- SAP Managed Tags:
21 Comments
