automaticable

If the 16+ years of schooling I went through taught me one thing, it was that plagiarism is as close to murder as you can get without becoming a criminal. I don’t think I’ve seen people get riled up about something as easily as a professor who catches a whiff of plagiarism. So why is it that there is such obvious, guiltless plagiarism running through the blog world?

You may not see it if you casually peruse your favorite blogs, but as a semi-addicted stumbleupon user (the first step is admitting I have a problem, I know) I see this all of the time. Every stumble-session I have invariably leads me to a page that has blatantly ripped their content from another source without citation whatsoever. I can almost forgive someone for copying content word for word as long as they give a hat tip (and link) to the original source, but generally this is not the case.

I imagine some people, especially those that repost their favorite photos from other sites, do not realize that they are stealing other people’s work. These people see something cool and just rip it into their own blog without even thinking about it. But most people who blog know exactly what they are doing, and they do it purely out of laziness and/or selfishness. People want to drive traffic to their own blogs and they either don’t want to work for it or they do not know how to come up with their own content. These are the people that infuriate me.

Not only are they stealing someone’s work, but they are creating what I like to call “internet pollution.” This internet pollution is not only morally wrong, but it is ultimately bad for the user as well for a number of reasons:

1. The obvious reason plagiarism is wrong, the original author does not get credit for their own work
2. On social sites such as Stumbleupon, this creates duplicates of content which adds no value (and I would argue, negative value) for the user, and
3. Related to #1, the work loses its original citation, which means the user will never be able to find further work produced by the creator if they find it interesting

Reason #3 is what has personally annoyed me the most. I can’t tell you how many times I have run across a set of amazing photographs, blog articles, or artwork that I wished I could have followed up on.

Because of my continued frustration with the online polluters and moral internet scum (yeah, it’s that bad!), I have come up with a way that I feel I can personally help clean up this mess, even if it is just a tiny bit. I’m hoping that you will use this strategy to help me combat plagiarism and internet pollution online. Here is my strategy:

If you know for a fact (as in, you’ve seen the original work published elsewhere) that the page is plagiarized, make your way down to the comments field. You will always have to put in a login/email to post a comment, but luckily these things aren’t validated. So just type in whatever you want, it doesn’t matter that much. Here comes the good part. It is a little bit rude, but I feel that if my words can drive traffic away from sites that lack common decency online then I have helped out the internet community as a whole. Anyway, I generally say something along the lines of,

I don’t know if you realize this or not, but every bit of your content is ripped from [insert source here]. You have blatantly copied this work with not even a link to the original article. By reposting this work, not only are you plagiarizing the author, but you are helping to pollute the internet with this reposted tripe. Post something original, or at the very least give credit where credit is due.

Ok, that is actually a little nicer than how I usually word it, but go ahead and add your own spin. I give you permission to take creative license with it.

The great thing about this is even if the comment is moderated out, the author will see your words and will hopefully take them to heart. I know that it sounds a bit like a personal crusade, but I am hoping that a few automaticable readers will join me in helping to clean up the clutter that is plaguing the web.

If you have any success or similar frustrations, let me know in the comments.