Hello fellow steemians, greetings to you all. I'm glad to come your way with my achievements task 3 which is about content etiquettes.

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I recall back in high school where when assignment are given my colleagues and I will sometimes try by all means to get the books of those people who we deemed to be more intelligent so we can compare our works to theirs to check if what we did was correct, or to find means to copy their works into our own books.

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We do this either because we didn't get enough time to do our own works, we did not understand the topic or we were lazy to do the assignment. Even though we get caught and sanctioned sometimes, little did I know that there is an act called plagiarism against which are rules and consequences.

Later when I entered the tertiary, I thought I could just copy indiscriminately and paste in my work until I was prompted on plagiarism.

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What is Plagiarism?

According to Indian Journal of Orthopaedics, "plagiarism is derived from Latin word plagiarius which means kidnapper, who abducts the child. The word plagiarism entered the Oxford English dictionary in 1621".source

Plagiarism has been defined by the Encyclopedia Britannica as

“the act of taking the writings and works of another person and passing them off as ones own without acknowledging the original owners.”source

"It is act of forgery, piracy, and fraud and is stated to be a serious crime of academia. It is also a violation of copyright laws."source

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The World Association of Medical Editors4 (WAME) also defines plagiarism as
“the use of others’ published and unpublished ideas or words (or other intellectual property) without attribution or permission and presenting them as new and original rather than derived from an existing source.”source

Wikipedia also defines plagiarism as;

"the representation of another author's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one's own original work. Plagiarism is considered a violation of academic integrity and a breach of journalistic ethics" - Wikipedia

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Forms of plagiarism

According to enago.com, click here for source there are eight(8) common types of plagiarism;

Complete plagiarism

This is s aid to be the most severe form of plagiarism where a researcher takes a manuscript or study that someone else created and publish or submit it as their own.

Source-based plagiarism

This occurs when a researcher uses secondary source of data or information, but only cites the primary source of information.

Direct Plagiarism

This is also called verbatim, occurs when an author copies the text of another author word for word without the use of quotation marks or attribution.

Self or Auto plagiarism

This happens when an author reuses significant portions of his/her previously published work without attribution.

Paraphrasing

This is said to be the most common types where an author uses someone else's work with some changes.

Inaccurate authorship

This is misleading attribution of works.

Mosaic plagiarism

This is the inter-laying of someone else's text or phrases within his own research.

Accidental plagiarism

This may occur because of negligence, mistake or unintentional paraphrasing of another person's work.

Reasons why I shouldn't plagiarize

It is unethical - somebody worked hard to come up with a work and that person should receive the credit for it. I would not like it if someone should steal my work and publish it as their own.
Secondly, plagiarism will hinder me from letting people know of my own ideas on a particular topic and there are consequences as well.

Conclusion

All the above definitions and information from the different sources have made it clear that, plagiarism is not a good thing to do and to keep our steemit communities clean and authentic, I must produce original contents.

Remarks

I have read and understood the Steemit Etiquette on Steemit Community and will do my best to embrace them.

Special thanks to @cryptokannon and all Facilitators who are making steemit a better place for us.