What is Plagiarism and when not to Plagiarised with our Posts

In a student world, PLAGIARISM can get a failing grade that it is very much emphasised time and time again in all universities. And as a student in UK, this has opened my eyes to its' importance from the beginning of our courses where essays were needed to pass them. In contrast to the Philippines' medium of teaching where doing ESSAYS is not much used, unless for masteral courses that need Research works.

Unless college courses nowadays involved ESSAYS, a lot of Filipinos are not well-versed about PLAGIARISM. Generally, not all. I will exclude Filipinos abroad where courses needed essays left and right.

Curating plagiarised works

As one of the curators of @bayanihan, recently, more and more posts have been noted to be plagiarised. This can just be unintentional for some who are not aware of this and some have been noted to have done so in more than 1 occasion. More often than not, we have given warnings to some authors and have not been upvoting them.

This post will try to remind, inform, emphasise and educate us Filipino authors who are not so familiar with this term. In lieu with this aim, we hope that in so doing, authors can be made aware and refrain making a plagiarised post and give credit to whom it's due.

In Steemit, our reputation in the platform is very important if we want to be successful. Plagiarised posts can be flagged and our reputation will suffer. In the past, it have happened to some members who have done it, so take heed please with what we are saying.

In a decentralised platform, anything is possible. But in everything, not all is permissable.

Zero-plagiarism

If anyone do a research about plagiarism online, results will almost produce zero tolerance to plagiarism. Although, schools and universities do allow and accept about 15% content when it comes to essays, assignments, dissertations. In my experience, 15% was acceptable in our university for our essays, but still emphasising on crediting the right authors and proper referencing.

Steemit is about blogging, where personal stories, experiences, poems and other works are being written and produced. The point of copying someone's story and claim it as one's own work is a bit absurd, BUT IT HAS BEEN HAPPENING AND IS CONTINUING, hence this post.

To help, this I found in Middlesex University website from UK:

What is plagiarism?

"Plagiarism is taking someone else‘s work or ideas and passing them off as your own". It includes:

1.) copying – submission of someone else’s entire work as your own. The original work could be from the internet, a classmate, or a student in a previous year. 2.) copying parts from a number of different books, journals, or internet sites, and linking the parts together with your own words; 3.) failing to indicate a direct quote (quotation marks should be used) in the text. paraphrasing or synthesising material from a book, journal article or internet site without acknowledging the source in the text. 4.) composing a paragraph by joining together sentences from a number of sources and not acknowledging them in the text. 5.) using your own previous work in another assignment without acknowledging it.

source

Checking for plagiarised works

There are websites that can be used to do this. Some need membership to use their services, some are simple ones that can be accessed easily. Try these sites if you feel you need them as I personally find them helpful:

plagiarisma.net, paperrater.com, edubirdie.com

These websites give a % on how the context of a post is unique. Universities have their own also which can be different from what we can find here. For this post, the % will not be specified on what is allowed to not deemed plagiarised to prevent complacency.

Self-plagiarism

Oh yes, this we have seen too. An example is having 2 different usernames, posting on the same thing verbatim. That is blatantly intentional and there's no excuse.

Blogs on different sites are acceptable, just specify on what website the post was first written, then add the link. This we appreciate very much.

Photographs that are not credited

More often than not, this might just be unintentional. But there was an instance wherein somebody else's image was inserted among one's own images. Seriously.

It's also for everyone to know that there are also sites that make it possible to check if the photographs used were properly credited.

Bring on those quality posts

Preventing plagiarism is easy, we just need to properly give credit to those whom are due. It's their works, not ours. Some will call it stealing or borrowing, IT'S SIMPLY NOT OURS. Use BLOCKQUOTES and it's ok.

We know how difficult it is to sometimes start writing a blog, how much time is needed to actually finish one, but most times, all we need is that EXTRA effort to properly produce a quality post and contribute to the platform, staying TRUE to ourselves and to our followers. CHEERS guys!

This post is 91.8% unique in a plagiarism checker website.

Reference:
Middlesex University UK website