I think we agree on the deceit involved as a student, but disagree towards the seriousness of posting.
IMO, it is lazy and dishonest, regardless of who does it or where it happens.
It is not like stealing bread to feed your family.
And, of course, it is against forum rules.
I actually talked about this with another member that there are Christians in here who don't view it as trying to win an argument as much as thinking about the non-participants reading along. They might feel like if they can't say it any better that it's best to post the most articulate way of saying something possibly. Keep in mind that conversion is the ideal scenario for a lot of Christians.
That is fine - but how hard is it to write "I got this from..."? When I paste abstracts, for example, at the very least I include the title of the paper and I usually also include a link or other identifying information, such as the ISBN or journal information. It is not hard at all to do that.
But I do agree with you that you should however 100% understand the material that you are posting from your 'Hero.'
Indeed. These are discussion forums. If you paste something from a source, you should own up to it and either be ready to explain it/discuss it, or be ready to say something like "I don't really understand this, but I thought there were some good points".
THAT is fine. I've done that. It is NOT ok, even on a discussion forum, IMO, to paste something and use that AS your 'argument, ' whether you understand it or not.
I found myself in a funny position once where the person I was talking to had this intense hatred for WLC. I understood why, but it actually had nothing to do with WLC material that I thought the person would find very interesting. I made a long post where I spent a bit of time bringing WLC points together from my notes because I personally found that Craig had my favorite arguments for the topic we were on (a little bit from me was sprinkled into it). I also spent a bit of time reorganizing the material to what I thought would flow a lot better. The funny thing is that I felt weird not commenting that it was WLC because it was so brutally plagiarized, however I felt like the WLC hatred bias was so strong with the person that it would actually hurt to mention him lol. I didn't mention him to avoid it being shrugged off without giving it a fair read.
At least you had a good excuse! Now what would you have done if someone had recognized or searched and found that you had done a fair bit of copy pasting? Would you have ranted and raved and insulted the person? Or might you have done what you just did here? If I had found you out and confronted you, and you explained why you had done it, I would (probably ) have responded with something like "Oh, understood."
But as I had written on this forum a while back (you probably did not see this), one of the reasons I found this forum in the first place was because I was reading on another forum about a creationist that had plagiarized most of a HUGE post (about 70% of a post that when copied and pasted into word took up more than 2 pages) had made the same post here and gotten lambasted for it. So, I came over here and found that post in question, and then readily found a few more examples. And stuck around (in large part because the trolls were less numerous here).
And in each of these cases, no apologies were made. No reasons were given (such as yours above). Nope - like Uber, in those cases, the creationists lashed out and declared that the only reason others commented on their plagiarism was that we could not handle their arguments. On the other forum (not to drag too much off topic past history into this...) that this guy was caught on, he had made the following claims all on his own - that any new new structure requires at least 1 new protein, and any new protein requires at least 300 new bases in the gene that encodes it. And on that forum, he was asked, by about 5 people, over the course of 6 months or more, probably 2-3 dozen times, to explain why that is so and to give an example, and every time, he either ignored the request or insulted the person making it.
THAT sort of thing is why I search for plagiarism because it informs me whether or not the person will be worth the effort to discuss the issue with.
Uber's response (and general attitude) tells me that he is not.
I actually find myself intrigued by your position on the college honor committee. That sounds difficult if you have a determined plagiarizer. For instance there are times where I try very hard to track down material in search engines and just have no luck. Hmm, can't a motivated plagiarizer just select material that they know does not show up online?
They should be able to, but that takes time and effort. Of course, if they are taking the time and making the effort to find an untraceable source, why not just do their own work?
I will say that it is usually very obvious - it is one thing for a student to 'copy' a phrase or even a whole sentence because they don't know how to paraphrase or explain something in their own words, it is quite another to paste a whole paragraph and change 1 or 2 words hoping that it will throw off the plagiarism checking software or Google.
Of course, when we catch students copy pasting whole paragraphs, they never pretend to have written a great paper or to have expertise in the subject and they do not just insult and declare victory...
Better you than me lol that sounds tough if the plagiarizer is determined to seek out obscure sources. I think about DVD courses that I have from The Great Courses. Hmm I haven't looked into it but I'm thinking that only members have access to the transcripts of the courses. If that's true that could be a candy store of plagiarism for them!
oh boy...
