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→About my Plagiarism Edits: More thoughts.
* Large sections of text should not be copied, even if a citation is provided and quotation marks are used. For example, it is not appropriate to create a Conservapedia article about a particular bird or animal by copying an entire article about the creature from another web site, even if you cite the web site as a source.
* Large sections of text should not be copied, even if a citation is provided and quotation marks are used. For example, it is not appropriate to create a Conservapedia article about a particular bird or animal by copying an entire article about the creature from another web site, even if you cite the web site as a source.
An online encyclopedia written as a wiki is not particularly useful if references are not cited. Students who use any wiki encyclopedia should not rely on it as a primary source for their work; at best it provides a starting point for further research. Because of this, it is especially important to cite sources. Students need to be able to follow up on what they read here, and to verify the information by reading the credible sources we provide. It is important for them to understand where the information came from - who did the study or wrote the opinion or what-have-you - so that they can bring into their understanding of the information any inherent bias or point of view the original authors may have. In addition, citing sources helps to minimize errors and helps readers to quickly identify information that may have changed or been updated since the article was written. --[[User:Hsmom|Hsmom]] 11:30, 10 October 2008 (EDT)
An online encyclopedia written as a wiki is not particularly useful if references are not cited. Students who use any wiki encyclopedia should not rely on it as a primary source for their work; at best it provides a starting point for further research. Because of this, it is especially important to cite sources. Students need to be able to follow up on what they read here, and to verify the information by reading the credible sources we provide. It is important for them to understand where the information came from - who did the study or wrote the opinion or what-have-you - so that they can bring into their understanding of the information any inherent bias or point of view the original authors may have. In addition, citing sources helps to minimize errors and helps readers to quickly identify information that may have changed or been updated since the article was written. --[[User:Hsmom|Hsmom]] 11:30, 10 October 2008 (EDT)
'''Can I cut-and-paste a whole article from another site?'''<br>
I believe that this would be unethical plagiarism. You can quote a snippet of information from another site - just be sure to include quotation marks (or set it apart from the text) to indicate which words are yours and which came from the other site, provide a reference (including site title, author, URL, and ideally date of retrieval), and ideally provide some in-text attribution. However, just putting quotation marks around the entire section does not make it ethical to copy large amounts of text from a single source. It is unethical to take an article written by someone else on another site (especially a commercial one), and copy the entire thing into an article here. When you do this, you are taking traffic away from the original site. On a commercial site, the author (or the site owner) makes an income from their writing via the ads on the site. The income is usually based on the number of pageviews and other site statistics. When you copy the entire article here, you eliminate the need for the reader to click through to the original site, thus depriving the author of appropriate compensation for their work. It's stealing, and the original author is losing income because of it. Even if the site is created by a government agency, and therefore is in the public domain, when you take traffic away from their web site, they lose pageviews, which ultimately could affect their funding and in turn the existence of the writers' jobs. Remember, the government agency is employing writers and in some cases photographers to actually create the content on their site. The appropriate way to use another author's material is to quote '''part''' of it, with a reference to the rest. You might say "Author Jane Smith, in her article ''This and Such'', argues that "whatever the quote is". <nowiki><ref>Jane Smith, ''This and Such'', retrieved 01/01/08 [URL]</ref></nowiki> As a basic guideline, if you are cutting and pasting something without integrating the material into the existing article, then you are probably plagiarizing. --[[User:Hsmom|Hsmom]] 15:56, 11 October 2008 (EDT)
===Already noted===
===Already noted===
I refer you to this exchange by a troll and the founder of this website:<br />
I refer you to this exchange by a troll and the founder of this website:<br />