RE: Interviewing the SteemSTEM Curators - @alexs1320
I am always glad to discuss the topic of plagiarism / wiki-like contributions with you anytime. I know our opinions slightly diverge in the details, but debating is always good.
It is indeed clear you and I disagree on what is plagiarism. While I agree with the fact that pure rewording does not bring much to Steem (however, not zero, in my opinion: there are worse things), I disagree on calling this plagiarism (legally speaking, rewording is not plagiarism).
However, we are in the same line on trying to get more people talking about their passion (and less and less wiki-style posts) in the future! This is the path we are all taking together at SteemSTEM! With more excellent bloggers on board, there will be less and less voting power available for the wiki-rewording stuff anyways :)
PS: I am not so sure I really want to being the debate here rather than on discord, especially as we had it already several times... But it is Friday night after all ... Friday night feeever ;)
For me, it's a puzzle, why would anyone even considered re-wording, because there are so, so many interesting details in all areas of human activitis. Recently, a guy was explaining to me all the steps involved in a production of - nuts and bolts. He was talking for 15 min straight. It's the same for every other profession.
On top of that, there are countless hobbies, cars, photography, fishing, hiking... with specific gear, specific tech, specific details that are interesting to read about.
The other thing to consider is the vast majority of journalism, which is a multi-billion dolllar industry of re-wording. You can search any news story on Google and get exceedingly similar articles page after page in the results, oftentimes in verbatim, images and all. This gives an uncountable number of people a full-time salary around the world!
Thus, whether we like it or not, the 'value' cannot by definition be zero, demonstrated by the above career choice.
But yeah for sure, when activity goes up to the point that we can actually sustain quality with the right amount of VP (As we used to in the good old days), thisi kinda thing can fek off, basically =)
In Serbia, average "news-reword-er" needs to write 30 masterpiece articles per day, or about 600 per month. It means that 1 such article costs about 1$ - not that high.
On the other hand, a copyrighter can earn 1000 for one sharp sentence.
Also, from the "artistic"/scientific point of view: there billions of cat photos, some of those have value (funny photos) but would you prefer to see undiscovered species in Nat Geo?
It's true, thousands of news-re-word-ers are earning their salary, yet none of them will be admired. On the other hand, Jacques Cousteau will earn his salary + 10 more but he created something immortal.
Of course, I gave very extreme examples, but you understand me
I can't answer to this and I really hope to see less and less of these. However, one has rewording and rewording. Some people just explain in their own words what they have read here and there, what they have learned and why this is cool. Some others take an article and just rewrite it sentence by sentence. Whilst I am in favor of supporting the first, I am also in favor of ignoring the second (even if this is not plagiarism).
The second would be considered plagiarism in any university I think.
I think if a person strives to be original, then plagiarism will take care of itself. So let's say you have a novel 'argument' (a new way of putting known information together so that you reach an unexpected conclusion), then you can reword from x number of sources and use novel examples to explain ideas, and yet the end result will still be original because you organized the information differently.
Overall, it's only extreme laziness that leads to plagiarism, since it's so easy to avoid if you have even an ounce of passion for what you're writing.
No, but this would anyways not be published as not bringing any new insight on a topic. But this is not exactly what we talk about here, don't we? We are talking about people blogging about what they learned online on a given topic. Which consists in a part of what steemstem supports.
Agree, this is a bad slippery slope and I personally don't see the point in doing this. If one aims to build an audience, one needs to bring something personal around here.
Yes that's perfectly acceptable, the 'what I learned this week' kind of posts can be very entertaining and informative when done properly.
"When done properly" is the key... Many people have to learn...