I think that people who copy/paste and plagiarise the works of others can be divided in 3 groups:
1. Those who know what copy/pasting is, do it and don’t care about the consequences.
2. Those who intentionally copy/pasted once or twice because they were in a hurry, lacked proper knowledge about the subject and decided to take an easy route.
3. Those who have a different understanding of the plagiarism concept due to educational/cultural differences.
I would like to focus on the third group and I will start with a quote by Carol Olausen, the director of Miami's American Culture and English (ACE) Program regarding academic honesty/dishonesty:
“An academic integrity policy is completely based on our culture. It's not universal. What we do doesn't exist in other countries, and how we interpret it is completely based on our own culture. Coming into a new place and having to catch up really quickly on something, literally, that's so foreign is definitely a challenge."
What does this mean?
Students who come to America have different views on plagiarism because of their culture and their education.
The Asian culture is a collectivist culture.
“A collectivist culture is one that prioritizes the goals and desires of the whole over the needs of the individual. Often in Japan, India, and other East Asian countries, ideas that are beneficial to and shared by the community are not individually attributed, but rather recognized as universal knowledge. Students that grow up with this perspective may not understand why citations at the end of a research paper are important; furthermore, citations might even make them feel uncomfortable, as they recognize individual authors above the community as a whole”.
“Throughout much of China, students in schools are taught the Confucian principle of respecting those who offer wisdom by memorizing their teachings. Whether in history, social studies, science, or literature, most Chinese students are discouraged from producing original work in an academic setting and instead advised to remember and repeat the ideas of the masters in those subject areas as a form of respect”.
“For some cultures, there is no formalised understanding of plagiarism. In Eritrea, there is no legal copyright protection either for authors within their country or for writers of foreign works. If a student arrives in the United States without a working definition of plagiarism from their home country, it may be difficult to comprehend and adhere to the US concept of academic integrity”.
What is the purpose of this thread?
If the American Education System has recognised that other cultures are educated and live by other standards and have a different view on the works of others, is it then not possible that one part, at least a small part of the users that get banned on Bitcointalk due to plagiarism actually don’t know what they did wrong?
Yes, there are rules here. Yes, they should read and understand the rules and adhere to them like everywhere else. If we take a look at the banned users we can certainly say that based on the way they write in English they are not from an English speaking community, correct? Their posts are full with grammatical errors and sometimes utter nonsense. How does someone who doesn’t know how to write a simple sentence or two understand the concept of plagiarism or rule 33?
33. Posting plagiarized content is not allowedhttps://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=703657.0So what can be done? I can think of two things.
A) We make a thread dedicated solely to plagiarism and have it as a sticky in the Help, Off topic and especially Bounty section. At the moment there is no such sticky thread. Doing my search I found this thread >
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5037514.0 As you can see there has been no posts in it since October 2018. But the thread is good and can be used for this purpose. The thread could be updated by anyone interested to help out. I would be interested when I have the time.
Anyone reading this should understand that I am in no way protecting, justifying or finding excuses for anyone plagiarising any content here. I do my part as well in reporting and posting about such content in the Report plagiarism thread in Meta. I would just like to offer another view and try to help that small part of users who might not know that copying content is a serious offence.
B) After a user registers on the forum he should be redirected to the above thread. The thread will explain in layman terms what copy/pasting is, why it should not be done and that posting plagiarised content here
WILL result in a permanent ban. There will also be examples of posts that got other users banned and examples of proper quoting and citation.
Source:
https://www.turnitin.com/blog/cultural-differences-in-plagiarismFeel free to share your thoughts.
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