It neither shocks me nor surprises me to see this level of rank hypocrisy from the majority of those who are calling for Lauda to be burnt. So many of the persons who regularly defend plagiarism and other wrongdoing, and who falsely accuse Lauda of abusing the rules for personal vendettas, are crawling out of the woodwork to call for the strictest punishment—obviously, based on personal vendettas. As I said: I am not surprised.
What shocked and surprised me was, of course, the evidence. I was about ready to dine on feline fillet; and I grilled Lauda about this in private.
Having thoroughly investigated the matter, I think that this is one of those rare corner cases of the lability of the human brain. I do not think that Lauda realized what she was doing, or intended to rip off other people’s texts. I also don’t think that Lauda could fool me.
I do take into consideration that I have substantially interacted with Lauda, and I have seen her repeat things by rote in the course of ordinary conversation. (Just not from text written by other people—insofar as I am aware—and not so much as here.) I am too amateurish in textual criticism to be sure; but from my reading of the posts side by side with the source texts, I don’t think it’s implausible that she interpolated her own words with memorized talking points, without even thinking about it.
Between that, the manner of her response, and the sincerity with which Lauda despises plagiarism (including what happened here), I do not think that any action is warranted in this matter.
I say that as someone who would sooner forgive murder than plagiarism.
Constructive ResponseI'm on the feeling of: the way those edits were made: were to achieve the objective of providing substance as to make a post; rather than reference people correctly to the information.... passing it on as themselves.
What would you suggest Lauda should have done differently? (I mean now—not in 2014–2015, the answer to which is obvious.)
Lauda’s edits called out her own offence in blood-red highlighting, with backlinks both to the accusation against her,
and to her response.
The latter is important, because Lauda’s response provided better sources. bitcoinchan only got 2/6 (possibly 3/6) sources right. In one case, Post 5, he cited a thread on another forum that itself appears to be a plagiarism (!). In another, Post 4, he cited an article that contained the relevant text inside a properly cited quotation from an article on another site (!!). In the case of Post 3, he improperly cited some other site for text from a Wikipedia article—even though the other site had cited Wikipedia (albeit without proper quoting)
within the portion that bitcoinchan quoted.
I note this after having spent hours examining the evidence and researching the sources myself. (How many people posting on this thread did that?)
Lauda’s response demonstrated a level of actual caring about credit to sources that I have never seen from anybody accused of plagiarism. And it was done in an understated manner, which I find appropriate: There is nothing to brag about in correcting one’s own wrong. She just went and corrected it. She didn’t make a big poor-me show of self-flagellation, or indulge in any other histrionics—she just quietly thanked the party who brought this to her attention, marked up her old posts in a way that makes it bloody obvious what words originated from others, and belatedly gave credit to the appropriate sources.
I agree with this:
Because she handled this incident in a constructive way? Unlike how some other people react when accused of the same.
...although, NotATether, I do not agree with some of your defence of Lauda later in the thread:
I'm going to fix some of the highlighting bitcoinchan made that does not show copy and paste. Because the definition of plagiarism is copying and pasting stuff (without attribution).
Plagiarism does
not equal copying and pasting. It is possible to copy and paste without plagiarizing; and it is possible to plagiarize without copying and pasting.
For about the past three weeks, I have been intending to write a proper post explaining what plagiarism is and isn’t—with reference to discussions by organizations focused on academic integrity, not only with my own opinion on the subject. I intended that for the RegulusHR thread, since I do not think that Regulus committed plagiarism
per se; he did a copy-paste and a shitpost, but not a plagiarism. (I don’t think it’s possible to
plagiarize someone else’s worthless shitpost, because it has negligible or zero original substance; plagiarism is the intellectual theft of credit for original work, which wreathes lazy idiots in a glory that belongs to another.) It is also relevant to the “hacker” thread, because “hacker”
did commit a clear-cut plagiarism.
Some (arguably not all) of the six posts cited by bitcoinchan facially meet the definition of plagiarism, regardless of some changes in wording. The only reasons why I am defending Lauda, rather than calling for her to be banned, are that (0) I really do not think it was intentional, and (1) her response was appropriate—I think it was the best that she could have done in the circumstance, absent a time machine.
A Technical QuestionPlagiarism is one of very few things that theymos has zero tolerance for (except for account buyers).
If we find that you plagiarized, then you absolutely will be permanently banned, even if we find it years after you did it.
When was the forum rule about banning plagiarists made an administrative policy? My question is if any hypothetical punishment of Lauda would be an
ex post facto application of a rule that did not exist when the posts were made.
Although I dislike advancing such a technical argument,
* you just
know the question would be raised if any other user were accused of plagiarism from so many years ago.
I also know that I have had the term “ex post facto” tossed at me in the “hacker” case, where it did not even apply. Thus in fairness, I must raise this point in Lauda’s defence.
(* If it were my forum, I would ban plagiarists regardless of whether or not I had bothered explicitly to place users on notice with an anti-plagiarism rule. Plagiarism, actual plagiarism (see above), is just something that people should know is wrong; and frankly, I would not want any forum members who don’t already know that plagiarism is wrong before they sign up. But then, if this were my forum, things would look a bit different around here. :-)All six posts identified by bitcoinchan far predate the addition of Rule 33 to
mprep’s Unofficial List of Official Rules:
Added new rule with an explanation (as per hilariousandco's suggestion):
33. Posting plagiarized content is not allowed.[e]
<...>
33. This includes both copying parts or the entirety of other users' posts or threads and copying content from external sources (e.g. other websites) and passing it as your own.
The absence of any anti-plagiarism rule from the list in the time period up to 10 May 2015 is confirmed by the
earliest available archive.org snapshot, which, by coincidence, was made several hours after the latest post in question.
It
is an
unofficial list of rules, with a note at the top stating that it “
is meant to serve as a reference/educational/informational thread, NOT a rock solid list of rules” (boldface and underscore in the original). If hilarious was already banning people for plagiarism before mprep listed this rule, I would have no criticism of that.
A forum search for posts by theymos made at least 1392 days before the time of this writing (2020-05-22) and matching any word from
plagiarism plagiarized reveals only the following two posts:
Subject: Re: DGCmagazine Bitcoin IssueThe article is full of plagiarism from Bitcoin Market and bitcoin.org.
Subject: Re: Bitcoin WikiI desire attribution for my contributions. WTFPL, at least, seems to suggest that I would be OK with people plagiarizing, which I am not. Copyright should be abolished, of course, but I don't want to
encourage people to take my work without attribution.
There are probably legal problems with it. Compare it with the similar CC0 license:
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcodeOne sentence is not going to cover all of the legal issues. Potentially someone could sue
us for using our own stuff.
WTFPL is less restrictive than CC-A, so legally copying material from the Bitcoin wiki would require you to get permission from
all page authors.
I prefer CC-A -- including a link back to the page is not a huge legal burden, and it clearly indicates that plagiarism is not acceptable. No one's going to sue anyone, anyway. I wouldn't mind CC0 or any of the more restrictive CC licenses.
Thus though it’s clear that theymos always despised plagiarism, a stance for which I give him credit,
* I cannot find any evidence that the forum had an explicit policy on this issue before hilarious suggested the rule to mprep.
(* But alas, theymos conflates plagiarism with copyright issues. Copyright is completely irrelevant to plagiarism! You must not plagiarize the words of Shakespeare, or of Ovid, although all of their works are unquestionably in the public domain in every jurisdiction in the world. It is possible to violate copyright without plagiarizing, and possible to plagiarize without violating copyright; the two issues are completely separate, although, as
I have observed before on this forum, the copyright lobby enjoys the popular conflation thereof.)
As a practical matter, if Lauda were hypothetically to be banned for posts made in 2014–2015, then the archives should be scrutinized; and every user who has ever committed a plagiarism here should be banned, going back to the time when this forum was hosted at
forum.bitcoin.org, or even when it was a Sourceforge forum. Not that I would object to that, in and of itself.
