Citing sources - is it enough? The war against plagiarism continues

in #discussion7 years ago (edited)

While trying to find good posts this morning, I've found plenty of copy/paste articles.

The catch is, they do what some tell them to: They cite their source.

Steemit header Samstonehill

Here are a few examples of this:

Is citing a source enough?

I personally don't feel that citing the source at the end of the article is anywhere near enough. Some people re-post from their own site (I'll write more on that further into the article), but in most cases, they did not write a word of it themselves. They try to cash in on other people's hard work. In short, this just doesn't feel fair. Looking a bit further, this can only be bad for the platform.

The original authors could find their article here and notice people made money off of it. Sure, there's a link to their article at the bottom of the post, but all of the content has already been displayed, so no one will bother clicking to their site.

These original authors will not have good things to say about Steemit, the platform that allowed others to profit off of their hard work. This will drag down the platform's reputation and this, in turn, will drag down the price of Steem/SBD. Not something we want, right?

Yet, there are plenty of bots voting on this stuff. @minnowpond does this. Steemians can also invoke bots like @booster, @randowhale, etc.

These posts will get upvoted by 'community projects'. Can you imagine how bad this looks to an outsider?

I flag copy/paste posts, even though it can feel harsh to flag a newbie. I check if they've been warned before. If not, I explain my flag to them. My one flag won't hurt them much in the long run, if they switch to writing original content after it.

Could bots help?

header Steemit samstonehill

@cheetah warns us about possible cases of plagiarism from time to time. Sure, it doesn't catch them all, but it's a nice warning. However, many new members don't understand or even know about plagiarism. So the small notice @cheetah leaves on people's posts is simply a warning for the long-standing Steemians. It warns us, so we can dig a bit deeper. However, it doesn't explain to the author that they might be doing something wrong, and it doesn't explain to new members that this post is something they might not want to vote for.

I know it might not be @cheetah's true purpose, but I have left a suggestion anyway:



@cheetah has a wide reach to exactly the kind of public that could benefit from an explanation of plagiarism and its downsides. I feel it could help new members make the right decision for their blogs if it would simply explain plagiarism and double-sided proof of ownership.

Double-sided proof of ownership

Header Steemit samstonehill

I'm not sure if it's a good term, but it covers my meaning well. With double-sided proof of ownership, I basically mean that citing a source on Steemit isn't enough for someone to proof that the original article was theirs. It could just be a simple case of identity theft instead.

To proof you're the original author of an article, you'll have to link back to your Steemit profile from the source site aswell. You can do this by writing a note at the bottom of an article:

This article has also been published on Steemit.

Or if possible, you can do this by adding your Steemit profile link to a Contact / About us / Social Links page.

I've run into a couple of very good articles these last few days, which were re-postings of someone's own website/blog/whatever. However, I couldn't backtrace this, so I asked them to please add some proof that they indeed were the ones to re-post on Steemit. They added the information on their own site, after which I felt safe to upvote them. Luckily, they understood why I asked this of them and now, they have less chance of missing out on a vote!

How about you?

How do you feel about the articles that simply copy/paste from somewhere else? Do you feel that linking the source at the end is enough? Do you vote for them? Do you flag them? Do you call the author out?

What do you do when you see @cheetah's comment on a post? Do you vote for it anyway? Do you check out the link to see if the Steemian is the original author? Or do you simply skip on any post @cheetah votes on?

Do you re-post articles you wrote for other sites? How do you make sure people don't think you plagiarised your content?

I'd love to hear what you think!


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Fair warning: Copy/paste comment and obvious bot comments will get flagged.

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@playfulfoodie Good points in bringing up this one! Copy pasting is a no-no; Flagging is an effective means to alert plagiarized works, but if Steemit can come up with a better approach so the writer gets sanctioned and so the community becomes aware of it immediately, that would be wonderful for the community.

if Steemit can come up with a better approach so the writer gets sanctioned and so the community becomes aware of it immediately

I'd love for that to happen :-)

I think it is OK to flag people who are just showing off their Googling skills, AND make money from it.

Thanks for sharing your view @ocrdu! I agree with you :-)

But ... we must not let this sort of thing draw away too much of our attention from the ways the really slippery schemers and gamers make the big money and rape the reward pool. There are bigger fish to fry.

There are indeed! Some battles, however, can hardly be fought by people with low SP and such. Except for refusing to ever upvote reward pool rapers...

Can you imagine how easily a whale could bring down a reputation from 65 to 0 if this person pisses them off? Not to mention resetting all of their pending rewards to 0... It's a sad thing to admit, but I know I have to pick my battles carefully if I still want to earn a little bit. In my case, flagging plagiarists works best, because their flags don't hurt much. I do try to support @sherlockholmes when I think about it! Thanks for reminding me.

copy / paste of copyright material is wrong, full stop.

There is a lot of public domain material around that people can use. Even at that, they should at least take the time to format it so it fits in here on Steemit.

If all they want to do is copy/paste then the upvotes should reflect the effort. LIke no upvote. IMO

A new user @ocanada posted a public domain story of Stephen Leacock's this morning after taking the time to format it for easier reading on Steemit and adding graphics.

You have collected your daily Power Up! This post received an upvote worth of 0.16$.
Learn how to Power Up Smart here!

If all they want to do is copy/paste then the upvotes should reflect the effort. LIke no upvote.

I completely agree with this. I'm not sure how I feel about the post from @ocanada, but atleast there's some effort there. I'm not sure how hard it is to obtain a readable copy of this story, so I don't know if this is a good service or not. I personally wouldn't upvote it though, so I will just leave it alone instead.

Hi @playfulfoodie, I just stopped back to let you know your post was one of my favourite reads and I included it in my Steemit Ramble. You can read what I wrote about your post here.

If you’d like to nominate someone’s post just visit the Steemit Ramble Discord

Aww that's so sweet of you, thank you very much!

Hi playfulfoodie, this driving me crazy too, and yet there have been times I have found an article and wanted to share it with the SteemIt community, but didn't want to seem like I was reposting for rewards.

I don't flag these post that comes from elsewhere and just a source is commented, but I don't upvote them either.

Thanks for sharing your view on this @whatsup! I sometimes ignore these posts, because I'm not sure how the community feels about them. But I see them getting rewards and when I think about how unfair this would feel if I were the original author of the piece, I feel like I should be flagging them. For the original author, and for the reputation of Steemit.

I feel that if you feel that way you should use your stake how you like and flag away. :) I would appreciate people getting freer with their flags to help shape the site. It will all come out in the wash.

you have made some excellent points here.. I did a post with a broken link..it went to the site intended but got a 404 and cheetah commented, which was great .. I fixed the link..after 7 days you can't.. I like your idea about linking on both ends if it is yours... also I see people putting complete comic books by someone else ..famous ones..sometimes not even siting the source.. weird.. it gets shared too. not sure how it all works.. I like you idea of letting people know.

Yeah, that's the biggest issue here: After 7 days, you can't edit your post anymore. So what if some bigshot author finds a copy/paste post of his content and decides to make trouble, because some Steemian earned from it? This Steemian can't do anything about it, even if, two weeks after posting, he/she found out about plagiarism. This person could get into some serious legal trouble.

I can understand showing a comic book page when reviewing it, but at the very least they should cite their source. Simply copying entire comic books here, without adding any value is just wrong. Definitely worth flagging in my opinion.

The fact that it gets shared just shows us that a lot of people don't know or understand the concept of plagiarism. That's why I feel it should be much more apparent on the site that these things aren't allowed.

I dont know 100% how cheetah or steam cleaners works, but this sounds like a rewsonable idea. Maybe someone could write an official sreemit paper on what is or isnt plagirism and how to avoid it.

I think there should be guidelines as well on how to proove its your own content. Ive seen several people just post a picture with no explanation of if its there's or not so you dont know whether or not to flag it.

Overall I think we need tp start off with a way of flagging the people who dont even link the original content and just copy and pasre then move on to the other offenders.

My feelings flag all plagerisers away. Its the only way they will learn.

Ive seen several people just post a picture with no explanation of if its there's or not so you dont know whether or not to flag it.

Yes, you're absolutely right! This is very annoying in photography posts.

We have a small piece about plagiarism in the Steemit FAQ, but I'm not sure how many people even visit it. I think it should be more prominent. Whenever there's someone suspected of plagiarism, I think they should be informed, so they can avoid this in the future. Heck, a bot like @cheetah could even write up a little post about plagiarism and correct sourcing (aswell as double-sided proof of ownership) and link to it in their comments. That way the comment stays small, but the information is there for the taking.

Not everybody is keen to link back and forth between different mediums.

It sounds logical but I for one would not feel inclined to (for privacy-related reasons). Then again neither am I inclined to copy-paste my own materials. 'shrugs'


Quite support your suggestion to cheetah though. It takes a few encounters on one's or others' posts to get a sense of what cheetah is about.

Not everybody is keen to link back and forth between different mediums.

That's a very good point. Some quite like to be anonymous here on Steemit. However, I guess those people shouldn't copy/paste their own articles either, because that's a very obvious link to their own identity. Or well, I guess they'll risk people not believing it's them.

Yes, I think not everyone understands cheetah's underlying motives. Especially the Steemians who aren't too well versed in the English language. I think for them, it's easier to ignore cheetah. If it would show some extra info, it might trigger them to get to the bottom of things.

Great article. Just wanted to say thank you for raising this point with me yesterday was it was my one concern and wasn't sure what was the best way to go about it.

I'm conflicted in the sense that I enjoy discussing crypto and other stuff on a personal account but also feel that Steemit is a great platform to share content from our website and possibly monetise that way.

In the current media world, it's becoming a struggle to make ends meet, making it hard to refrain from the clickbaiting as you need to have thousands and tens of thousands of views to even earn anything remotely decent.

So far I've seen that Steemit could be a potential answer to this so as a website, this is something we definitely want to try out.

I have edited my profile to better reflect our website to appear more genuine as well as linking to Steemit from our About Us page as you suggested.

Therefore I do have a question. On Steemit, do you think it's best to post the whole article and give a link back to the original article (obviously it's our content and we would look to explore options further to verify this), or should we post a few paragraphs and put in a "Read More" link that directs to the full article?

I'm happy you took no offense in my words yesterday and glad to see you mentioned Steemit on your website, because I really do want to support your posts here!

You're right, Steemit is an excellent way of monetizing your online content more. It takes some work to build up a good following, but you should eventually see some growth in your income here. Especially when you engage with the community on other posts aswell.

I think, for Steemit profit, showing the entire article might be better. For more traffic to your website though, a "Read more" link might be preferable. Personally, I'd go for the full article if you're looking to earn more here. Your mention of your website below every article can bring some extra visitors to your site either way.

Thanks for the reply :) I think that may be the best route to go down. We're going to have a look and try and figure out what kind of content on Steemit people want and then try and post a few of those a week, ideally one or two a day and add another one or two a day that are written exclusively for Steemit.

We'll link at the bottom of each article and add a little disclaimer as well. Hopefully that will help people see that we aren't posting content that is not ours

Sounds like a great plan! I know a few of us would love to promote the #gaming tag here, so you're sure to get some nice attention on your gaming articles from time to time. Steemit exclusives are especially loved by most, because it's a good way to help the platform grow :-)

I got too tired of things like these to really be bothered by it and take action. But I certainly agree with you. Other's articles should be used as a reference only, which should make sense to anyone with a rational mind...

which should make sense to anyone with a rational mind...

Yes, I keep being amazed at how many people don't seem to have such a rational mind...

I know my actions probably won't do much, but I hope they help a few people find the right way here on Steemit. Some have shown to be grateful for the tips I sometimes give, which is nice :-)

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