This thread is saddening beyond measure. I'd say something to directly reply to the downright idiocy in it, but the kind of people I'd be directing it to probably wouldn't understand it at all, and would be too lazy to check dictionary.com when in doubt.
Heck, I'll be a nice guy and just copy-paste the definition for "plagiarism" from source WordNet 2.0, Copyright 2003 Princeton University, available from dictionary.com:
plagiarism n 1: a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work 2: the act of plagiarizing; taking someone's words or
ideas as if they were your own [syn:
plagiarization,
plagiarisation,
piracy]
Do I even have to go further here? Your own personal value system might feel that it's OK to steal people's ideas
without adding any original content and then not giving credit. That's alright, and it's your own personal belief of what is right and wrong. But, like it or not, the english term "plagiarism" still applies to it.
What happened here is clear imo: a relatively new internet journalist at AnandTech got contacted by some of his "industry" friends that basically gave him the information in the article with a couple of copy-pastes, explaining how to look into the necessary DLL. Then, that new hire created an article around it, copying his friend's words with permission - problem is, that "friend" hardly got the permission to copy the article's words. It is also obviously possible that his did such a thing in his subconscious; it is wellknown that if you read a sentence explaining something and then you've got to explain it yourself, you are likely to copy such a sentence yourself, without even ever having typed it before.
The person who did plagiarism would in such a case - that is, should I be right- would not be AT's journalist, but his so-called source. This does not in any way excuse AT from not properly handling this situation, and denying proper
idea credit. As Regeneration said, the work involved in finding the proper DLL and the proper location in that DLL is substantial: you cannot just pretend you didn't copy the
idea if you're
Problem also is that AT clearly says they didn't find that themselves: "clever users" did. And it is wellknown here that the clever users are in fact from NGO HQ. So, another journalist not involved in the writing of this specific article later denying this is absolutely unacceptable. Everything before that is acceptable if you consider someone might have tricked them; but saying there is hardly any ressemblance between the two is ridiculous. The original source from the idea clearly is NGO HQ, and not accepting you did a professional mistake by trusting a random guy giving you random information is unacceptable, even more so for a site that does NOT classify itself as a rumor archive.
Uttar
