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→About my Plagiarism Edits: General comments.
:In most of the cases I've found (and I'm beginning to suspect there are a horrifying number of plagiarized articles here), I've re-written the article to include the source, to provide proper attribution, and to minimize the amount of material lifted from any one source. In this particular case however, I Googled the sentence from the article and found an abundance of sites which included the sentence word-for-word. The first several sites I reviewed were not credible sources and thus were not appropriate to cite. I did not have time to review all of the potential sources and determine whether there was a credible one or not. I hope that whoever put this sentence in the article in the first place did indeed get it from a credible site - hopefully they have this article on their watchlist and will provide the source. If not, someone else will have to either find a source or remove the sentence. --[[User:Hsmom|Hsmom]] 10:50, 7 October 2008 (EDT)
:In most of the cases I've found (and I'm beginning to suspect there are a horrifying number of plagiarized articles here), I've re-written the article to include the source, to provide proper attribution, and to minimize the amount of material lifted from any one source. In this particular case however, I Googled the sentence from the article and found an abundance of sites which included the sentence word-for-word. The first several sites I reviewed were not credible sources and thus were not appropriate to cite. I did not have time to review all of the potential sources and determine whether there was a credible one or not. I hope that whoever put this sentence in the article in the first place did indeed get it from a credible site - hopefully they have this article on their watchlist and will provide the source. If not, someone else will have to either find a source or remove the sentence. --[[User:Hsmom|Hsmom]] 10:50, 7 October 2008 (EDT)
::If you see something that is plagarised, and it's clear that it is, immediately remove it. Go to the talk page, explain what you did and provide the source where it came from. The point I made above is that anyone just cannot say that such-and-such is plagarized without stating the source; all that would be is "my word against your's". If the article is public domain and has no attribution tag at the bottom or a statement such as "text incorporated from...", cite that on the talk page as well. [[User:Karajou|Karajou]] 12:11, 7 October 2008 (EDT)
::If you see something that is plagarised, and it's clear that it is, immediately remove it. Go to the talk page, explain what you did and provide the source where it came from. The point I made above is that anyone just cannot say that such-and-such is plagarized without stating the source; all that would be is "my word against your's". If the article is public domain and has no attribution tag at the bottom or a statement such as "text incorporated from...", cite that on the talk page as well. [[User:Karajou|Karajou]] 12:11, 7 October 2008 (EDT)
==About my Plagiarism Edits==
Plagiarism is the act of passing someone else's work off as your own. It is deceitful and thus morally wrong.
I have been finding many pages which include plagiarism. In some cases, I will not have the time and/or the expertise to re-write the article, nor will I have the time to provide a detailed explanation on the article's talk page. Nonetheless, plagiarism should be removed promptly. Since I won't have the space to provide details about plagiarism in my edit summaries, I am providing further information here.
In general, I will deal with plagiarism I find by:
* Removing the plagiarized material.
* Including the apparent source of the material in my edit summary.
* Including "see my talk page" in the edit summary.
I consider the following situations to be plagiarism:
* Material that has apparently been copied word-for-word from another site, without attribution of any kind.
* Material that has apparently been copied word-for-word from another site, without quotation marks indicating which material is a direct quote. (Often, this includes articles which consist entirely of several paragraphs of information taken from a single source.)
* Articles consisting solely of large amounts of text copied from a single source.
* Material that has been paraphrased from another site without attribution.
Note that:
* When you copy information word-for-word from another source, you need to ''both'' indicate which text is quoted (by using quotation marks or setting it off from the rest of the text in blockquote form) ''and'' provide a citation using reference tags. Ideally, you would also provide in-text attribution (e.g. "according to so-and-so").
* A citation, quotation marks, and ideally in-text attribution need to be provided ''even if the document from which you are quoting is in the public domain''. If you quote from a public-domain source, such as a US government agency's web site, you need to show where the quote came from. The reader needs to know where the information originally came from.
* If you paraphrase information from another source, ''you still need to provide a citation''. Obscuring the source of the information by paraphrasing is not an appropriate way to get around the need for citations.
* 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)