I was reading the blog of a quite high profile player in this industry when I read a section that looked familiar. A quick search using a plagiarism checker revealed that 95% of his posting was a direct copy taken from another web site. (Not a blog on TrainingZone I might add.) In a blog should we make it clear when are quoting somebody else? Is it more acceptable in the blog format to borrow other people’s words or should we always be scrupulously clear on these issues? I’m interested to know other peoples thoughts on this issue.
2 Responses
Plagiarism in Blogs?
Always make it clear – if someone else has said it, give them credit for it! Every keyboard has a key for quotation marks, so use it! If you feel strongly enough about this, it might be worth going back to that blog and commenting on the origin of the text (especially if it’s a good one!), just stating where it was first published and adding that you, too, thought it was worth spreading! That way you’re not criticising the ‘plagiarist’, you’re just joining him/her in his/her appreciation of the original thought…
But be careful – how do you *know* for sure that your other source was the original? How do you know whether that source didn’t ‘borrow’ it from someone else, or worse, from an unpublished piece of text? Unless a piece of text is copied from a book or newspaper article, it’s often not easy to trace it back to its original source…
How to combat plagiarism issues?
It is important for the writers to understand that the plagiarism issues can be handled easily with the help of a plagiarism checker tool.