Bitcoin Forum

It is no longer news that Plagiarism is a serious offence not only in this noble forum, but also in the extensive academic fields. Newbies take note, its penalty in this forum is permanent ban. It doesn't actually matter when you are caught. You might commit plagiarism as a newbie and later caught when you are a senior member+, you will also face the consequences - according to rule 33 of the forum.

Without digressing, two cases of plagiarism has been identified;
1. Intentional Plagiarism(Purposeful appropriation of others work)
2. Unintentional Plagiarism.

I want to dwell on unintentional plagiarism;
Plagiarism may be said to be unintentional if the plagarist misuses the appropriate method of citation(citing an unexisting or different url from the source). In parentheses is as related to this forum. Or when the plagarist does not know that what he/she copied needs to be cited. Or when the plagarist intention is not to cheat.
I want to understand the basics of the unintentional plagiarism as regards to this forum. Is it that if found guilty of unintentional plagiarism, you will only get temporary ban.

Personally, I don't believe in anything called unintentional plagiarism. Since professionally it faces same penalty with intentional plagiarism. Unless the intention in the context is the intention to make money. Maybe, if your intention of plagiarising is not to make money, it should be called unintentional plagiarism.
Also, is there a possibility that someone will copy some chunks of knowledge that is not a general knowledge and forgets to cite it?

Having rejected unintentional plagiarism, I think it should rather be called plagiarism due to ignorance. Maybe, you are unaware of the conventions of citation. Then, you are unwilling to find the appropriate way to cite(plagiarism due to laziness). These are understandable to me, but unintentional plagiarism I do not understand.
Thanks all!

All cases of rule breaking are considered uniquely and not as a general case with the same outcome, while unintentional plagiarism might not exist on the forum, if a user us caught plagiarizing and gets caught, the details of the case would be considered before such user is banned or when they appeal.
Some members are judged on merits of their contribution to the forum over the years, this could result in a lower ban, with restrictions of signature space possibly,
• If a user makes an error on imputing the site link, this would also be considered by the mods, sometimes using quite tags, or simply "" "", is usually enough to avoid any punishment.
• The intent is also considered, was the user wearing a signature when the post was made? Does it bring them any form of benefit, or were they just excited about sharing some new information.

All these and more are considered, but these cases make up a minor part of rule breakers, majority simply broke the rules, cause they do not care about the forum.

Its case to case basis actually. There are some in the past who committed some plagiarism but since they contributed a lot in forum, Im pretty sure admins have considered it.

Plagiarism is a big sin so those who got banned are probably did with intent their did. If someone did plagiarism, then he is aware of it especially if he didnt understand those terms and condition you stated.

There's one case that comes into my mind: people telling "I've read somewhere that <this> and <that>".
Is that (unintentional) plagiarism or not? Is the source important if only the general idea is passed?
I'd say that there's no general answer for this and it depends...

So I'd go by the same statement as said just before me:

Rules are general guidelines, ands mods can interpret them for a given case. Nevertheless trying to discern whether plagiarism on a given case is intended or unintended is not necessarily something that I’d say is given much attention to.

Interpreting intention is not, in general terms, something that is going to be conclusive one way or another, so more often than not, the focus is going to be on the singular fact that plagiarism has been committed (by forum standards), that to second guess the reasons behind.

As I and others have reiterated over time, and due to this being one of the main causes for accounts being banned, a simple explicit well versed explanation above the posting textbox would not leave much wiggle room for complaints.

It is easy to find what plagiarism one member makes is. How?

• Look at post history
• If it is full of plagiarism, you can easily conclude that is a spammer, first and then plagiarism is made intentionally.
• If it is good and show some good effects, it is a first step to somewhat believe a single plagiarism could be unintentionally
• The forum gives members with good net-effects a chance to get a softer restriction on their accounts: signature ban, signature ban + account ban for a while, etc.

Moderators will never ban such cases if members make typos, mistakes when quoting, editing or leaving sources.

There's no such unintentional plagiarism, all of them is considered as plagiarism if they copy someone works. What I mean isn't copy and paste all entire other people works, but someone who paraphrasing general opinions and claiming as his own. Of course no one will know since other user might think it's general/appropriate answer.

I'd say user which writing other people idea is also plagiarism too, you can find it on Spam mega thread (mostly on Altcoin section) and read pages after 3-5 all they said is only repeating answer on the pages 1.

Recently made a similar  post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5350121.0) about plagiarism. It is still an ongoing discussion and one I doubt will end soon. The forum doesn't take kindly to plagiarism. If you go to LoyceV's  thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1926895.2240). you will find dozens of accounts reported for plagiarism some new some old. Turns out that even if you are Legendary you could get banned for plagiarism you did as a newbie. Personally I think a first time offender should be given the benefit of a doubt...a warning maybe. That way if the user plagiarises for the second time then he should be banned.

Can one actually Carry out Unintentional plagiarism  ?
Not at all, they're all performed intentionally as a result of ignorance over a topic, laziness,idea or event,not been aware of how the regulations and rule of an organization is meant to be, one can put oneself in a bastardized situation as a result of plagiarism.
The Fear of not making up a quality post leads to plagiarism, Most post are actually for the quest of Merits,so trying to make a quality and lengthy but post will want to carry out such acts......So Unintentional Plagiarism can't be done.

The problem here is that the forum itself (and I am not talking about this forum in particular, but web Forums in general) is treated more like a casual conversation than a scientific information resource where citation and acknowledgment are required. I am referring to unintentional plagiarism of course. Most people have never written a serious paper in school and actually have no idea that those things are required when you are conveying someone elses ideas. This is a much broader problem than just not following the rules of the forum.

This is very correct, I noticed this several times. Most posters will just read the content of others reply and summarise all by paraphrasing. Then drop it as their own reply under the same thread. That act is irritating and depicts laziness at its peak.

The most annoying aspect of it is that established members do it too. It should only be a newbie thing if it's to exist, but surprisingly I have seen established members upto snr members doing it. I have not actually seen a hero or legendary member do it.

I also heard the opinion that "no signature means the user is innocent", but this does not work.
The user can shill the project or increase the number of posts.
__
KingsDen, you better try to be a useful member for the forum, and then you will have a better chance of being exonerated in case of a mistake.
Plagiarism is not liked and not forgiven here, many users' accounts have been blocked for this reason.

It is now I understood @Upgrade00 reply.  It is assumed the intent is to make money if the user us wearing a signature. And if no signature, it is assumed the user just wanted to impress readers.

There shouldn't be two ways about it, it's either you plagiarized or you didn't. The moment you intentionally copied an article from online, the source should be given credit to, that's how it should be. I don't blame those that come into the forum and plagiarized though, I mean it's becoming a norm thing in the society these days so they might think it doesn't matter here. There's no more morals in the society, people easily steal people works without giving credit to and they go unpunished.

On other social platform, plagiarism isn't been punished as works are been stolen daily without no credits been given and yet there's no punishment to it. e.g on twitter, Facebook etc you can easily copy someone works, post it and get all the credit. Credit has to be given to this forum for still implementing rules that helps keep humanity in check.

The punishment the forum gives for plagiarism help resharp those guilty of it (atleast those that are sorry about what they did and want to change) as it helps them understand that when you steal you'll get punished.

It is not intentional when a post stated "I've read somewhere about ____ and _____ about ____ when that user knows that it is not his/her content in the first place unless he/she will provide the link where he/she read that content from and it won't be a plagiarism as result.

Hmmm it still is. It is possible the user " forgot" to cite the source or didn't remember the exact source they got the in formation. But that will be for the moderators to decide.

It is hard to believe those people who do unintentional plagiarism and for those who are doing it on purpose.

Some criminals are saying that they don't know what they are doing and they just do plagiarism accidentally, they are denying some accusations.

Even if it is unintentional or not, it is still prohibited in any platforms that's why keep in mind to always cite or to give credit to the original owner of a certain article or something.

IMO, that doesn't fall under plagiarism because you did specify that the content was sourced elsewhere.

For instance, we can see the difference between "I read an article on CoinDesk that (this guy) claimed that Bitcoin will reach 0" versus blatantly copying a quote or source without citing any source.

There is no accidental plagiarism only ignorance. If you recite or get your information from another source please include the link. If you're paraphrasing and building your arguments based on some research you've done it's probably still better to include the source.

If I am not wrong, I believe most of those who have been caught users that committed plagiarism are caught not on that  scale in which the user has been promoted to higher rank. And I don't kinda believe on unintentional plagiarism since there is no such thing IMO.

Clearly. It (also) depends on how much "purist" is the one who "checks" for plagiarism.



Well, while I would (mostly) agree with you, OP has clearly stated that not citing the source correctly (which is clearly there in my case, since my example even tells "I've read somewhere" instead of "I've read on CoinDesk") falls under "unintentional plagiarism". And that's what I try to point out.
As you see, people already have different opinions on that. My take is that it depends on how is the idea formulated afterwards. If it's (almost) identical text as in the source article, it's probably plagiarism. If only the broad idea is said then it's probably not plagiarism, it's just discussion (the possible culprit receives the benefit of the doubt)

Even reading and editing it is plagiarism in itself, just of a different kind and that is paraphrasing. Plagiarism is something that comes out of a person's conscious thought so, there is nothing accidental about it. You might blame it on ignorance, not to have been aware of such rules or the gravity of it with regards to the forum but then, you still committed intentionally either ways. That's just the way it is.
Plagiarism doesn't start and end with the forum, in the literate word, it is just the same exact thing but then, the detecting and enforcing of the law on it is what haven't gained a full recognition as it should have been and as such, it is ignored by most persons but here in the forum, uts a serious crime. Don't say you weren't told!

Call a spade a spade, if you plagiarized you just commit a punishable offence on the platform, nothing like intentional or unintentional plagiarism, that's why you could state or quote with reference, meaning you acknowledged the source that not directly from you but you admit and go inline by, just as you can't buy a car and claim you produce it, the reference has to go to the brand name.

It's very disheartening how it happens. That is why I'm most times surprised  when people say they don't know that plagiarism is an offence. I'll begin to wonder if there has been a time plagiarism wasn't an offence.

To be honest, it does not happen only here in the forum. Not sure about other schools around the world but here in my country, they don't teach that like thoroughly.

I remember back in my high school days when one of my former friends just decided to speedrun their essays by copy-pasting from random articles online and they just tend to get away with it. Oh and yeah, he got A for that. Freaking A from a work with no effort. I was naive that time that is why I can't talk about it.

We always have that one friend. During assignments, he would copy some off his classmates and paraphrase the rest.

Surprisingly, never got caught.

OP mentioned a situation with a wrong source/source link. I guess that can qualify as unintentional plagiarism. I don't believe someone who gave wrong sources for their quotes or did not quote all copied texts, only some of them, would be banned on this forum.


He never knows when it will come back to bite him. There was a case of a guy in my country who plagiarised his master thesis and it came out 20 year later when he became an MP.

They are very much likely to be banned than not (if and when they get reported). Although context can sometimes be derived, and posting history taken into account, I’d say that the vast majority of plagiarism is performed by lower ranks (or when accounts were lower ranks), when the accounts normally don’t have that much of a history to go by.

Probably quoting copied text is the better visual cue to use, since it makes it clearer that the intention is to bring to the post something not written by the poster. In any case, adding the reference link goes a long way if one is not capable of simply reading and expressing things with their own words.

Welp and good thing he's a former one, cause I ain't gonna be part of his copy-pasta craps. :D

Whoa, story time? Dis gonna be gud.


Exactly, enjoying your own success is something hard to come by as long as you put your effort in it :)

Now I feel old, missed those days of studying hahaha

Not surprised to hear that and your country isn't the only one experiencing this. Like I said earlier, the morals in the society has been long lost. People don't care anymore, things aren't the way it used to be when everyone hustled before they achieve their successes, today that can be easily bought or cheated on. My country is also guilty of this, the project which are given to undergraduate before completing their university degrees was a thing of honor in the earlier days but today 99.9% of university graduate just copied their projects form online.

We now have website where the previous projects completed by previous graduate are been kept (are been posted, and sometimes sold) and if you are given similar or exact topic to work on, you just have to go copy then change few world, submit and you'll pass. Undergraduate don't go researching anymore they just plagiarized and get awarded with colleges/university degrees.

When individual like this comes into the forum what do you expect, they already have the mindset set by the society that things like giving credits to owner of works been used or setting out time to create yours aren't important anymore. They look for the easiest way out and that's by coping others works, posing it as their and hoping to be awarded (merited).

Sir, do you mean that if one has a decent posting history, and eventually caught up by plagiarism, there is likelihood that he/she would be forgiven?
If yes, how often or how many times would the user get the second chance?

Not exactly a squeaky clean second chance, but historically, accounts with a certain degree of rank on the forum, and possibly the more reputed the better, have got to keep their account, but had to withstand a signature ban for a period of time, often within the one to two year range.

In addition, the actual act, the moment it was performed, and its recurrence will bear a saying in the final outcome. If it was a reiterative habit (perhaps even more than once), the chances will probably narrow down to that of a Quark.

This thread used to keep track of some appeals with such an outcome:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5144410.0

Newer ranked accounts, and lower ranked accounts probably stand close to no chances, lacking a backlog of posts to counter on the balance as a net positive account for the forum.

So in essence even if the forum have some measures of pardon to higher rank members with good reputation the user will still get his/her punishment with possible signature ban for a timeframe, this still bowl down to the truth that bitcointalk have zero space for plagiarism no matter how minimal or unintentionally the plagiarism is committed.

Plagiarism is the most meaningless thing. If someone plagiarizes other people's works to show his knowledge, he will obviously fail.

In my opinion, unintentional plagiarism is the same as unprovoked plagiarism. Unintentional is not an excuse for laziness in quoting. The title treatment here is the best treatment for everyone.

Theymos mentioned that each and every plagiarism case will be handled individually, so if someone commits plagiarism before 5 years and their accounts got reported today for permanent ban then they maybe taken into consideration about their presence here does made any changes and something like that.

Plagiarism is plagiarism, plagiarism in Bitcointalk forum is an offence. If a user plagiarized intentionally or unintentionally that user will face the law of the forum because the forum has always made it clear to it members that plagiarism is a big offence.

Plagiarism is, in principle, a bad and dishonest way for someone to appropriate someone else's opinion and present it as their own. This happens in real life on a daily basis, and I am aware of many public cases where prominent politicians in their master’s theses have literally plagiarized more than 50% of the content. If this is done by adults in much more serious situations, then we should not be surprised that many young people (some probable minors) do not realize that plagiarism is actually the theft of someone else's intellectual property - and any theft should basically be something bad.

I believe that there are big differences between people from different parts of the world regarding the perception of plagiarism - home and school education play a big role here. But regardless of these differences, anyone who becomes a member of the forum has the same conditions not to make such a mistake - all you need to do is read the rules of the forum.

Rightly pointed out sir.
This is the greatest factor affecting or influencing plagiarism in the forum. Maybe in different countries is is a serious offence, while some other countries it is close to a habit because of very flexible and unenforceable laws guiding it

Lucius hit the nail on the head. Posting something and pretending it's yours, is plagiarism. The rest is not. (Which doesn't mean that the rest might not be violating some other rule.)

There is however no difference between countries. Plagiarism is plagiarism and the definition of plagiarism does not change if you're in an other country.

Surely some countries have laws or no laws or flexible laws or unenforceable laws or whatever terminology fits you to try to act as if you didn't know you were breaking the rules. But even if your country doesn't punish plagiarism, the definition of plagiarism is VERY clear.

Because if you don't know the definition of plagiarism, then how can you tell your country is flexible towards plagiarism? ::)


So I'd suggest everyone to quit the useless pseudo intellectual discussions about countries, cultures and definitions, and to get to the point:

1. you copy-paste something that's clearly not yours: a photo of Brad Pitt or Britney Spears? An article from the New York Times or Yahoo Finance? A Youtube clip of Michael Jackson's Billie Jean? If it's clearly not yours, it is common policy to post a source, and if you don't, it's generally frowned upon. You should do this especially for written posts and articles, because in general it's less evident that the post is a copypaste.
(for instance, in the case of images, virtually 99% of all photos posted on this forum are considered non-plagiarizing copypasting, and most of the time quoting a source is not necessary, simply because it is so obvious that you are not the original author of that content)
>> this is not plagiarism, but this doesn't mean your post doesn't violate any other forum rules like zero value, burstposting, spamming etc.


2. you copy-paste someone else's work and pretend it to be yours: this is plagiarism. By definition it's intentional. "Unintentional plagiarism" does not exist and is a contradictio in terminis. Your intent has to be proven and this explains why mods are very careful before (temp-)banning someone for plagiarism.


Sure, there may be differences between individual countries' legal approach, flexibility and punishment of plagiarism, but there is no difference in the definition of plagiarism. Therefore, your culture, country or origin never counts as an excuse or a justification for plagiarism.

Plagiarism is an act of stealing intellectual property from someone and it can never be justified by any reasons. You should be responsible on creating your own thoughts and make sure that if ever you will mention some of their words, it is properly cited in order to avoid plagiarism. In the forum, there will be instances wherein even though you are genuinely certain that you did not imitate others idea, your post will still be deleted or reported. It is at some point hard to make up an idea that originated from you completely cause most of the things we post comes from other people's collaborated idea and expressed by us based on how we understood it.

You may misjudge how people will report post for deletion. In addition to the quality of post that do not meet quality standard, repeated, off-topic or plagiarism post are some of the thing that other users will report for removal by moderator. I never thought that someone would report a random post without reading anything the poster wrote for deletion and if they did then the moderator would also check the post before acting.

OP, however intentional or unintentional plagiarism will also be considered a violation which can be strictly enforced by moderators. It is still possible to get waivers if the user is a good contributor while on the forum and for any purpose plagiarism then I think it should be avoided. Be a good user and follow all the rule, you will enjoy it.