Plagiarism

I am 100% sure that everyone here knows about @cheetah, right? The famous (and at the same time pretty infamous) bot that hunts for plagiarism and gives you an upvote for it. It's pretty ironic, but that's how it works. Basically, it is the standard we use to determine if a post is plagiarized or not. Well, unless you're me that actually checks for plagiarism himself...I doubt anyone has the time for that. Cheetah detects plagiarism pretty well, so you can trust its instincts. Remember, the cheetah is considered as a cat, and they are sensitive. Unless you mean posts that are not written in English (yes I am looking at the amount of Chinese posts that got misfired), then that's another story. They seem to include some stuff that mess up with the big cat's senses, so that's another thing.

Header image source

Alright, let's get back to topic.

On the first day you joined Steemit, someone must have told you that it is bad to plagiarize stuff here. Or, if you stumbled upon this site on your own and is still walking in this extremely huge blockchain maze alone, then the welcome page actually mentioned about this in the Quick Start Guide. There's a reason why plagiarism is frowned upon here - and it is obvious - you are getting paid here and your stuff are to be valued here. It's like why you should not plagiarize a paper that is going to be submitted for academic review, people are going to read it and use it to value if you are going to get the certification (or vote, in Steem terms).

In human terms, plagiarism is copy and paste. For a slightly more detailed term, it is like using others' work as your own work. If you want the most detailed explanation I can find, then this is what Wikipedia gave.

Plagiarism is the "wrongful appropriation" and "stealing and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions" and the representation of them as one's own original work.

--Wikipedia

Technically, it happens when you are using someone else's work without giving appropriate credit nor putting any effort and used them as your own. So, the most human-friendly definition of it is "copy and paste while not giving sources". Guess you get that?

Now, I believe that most people that plan to at least do decently on this platform will know that plagiarism is bad. Like really bad. No one really plans to plagiarize to the extent that Cheetah finds you out, because why would you? But, even if you are trying to not get caught by Cheetah, you will still get caught some times. It's not because you copied and pasted, but you referred to some sources in your article.

Probably you will just go mad "I can't even refer to others in my articles?!" woah hold on. You can. But be smart.

Plagiarism occurs when you create your things with minimal effort, and using others' work without giving appropriate credit while using them as you wrote them. See that? Minimal effort, not giving credit, use as if you wrote them yourself. As long as these three does not exist, viola, your work is fine. In fact, referencing to other sources when you write your stuff is good practice. You will tell others that you did not grew this in your head and it can be somehow trusted because it is supported by some other sources, probably sources that are more trustworthy than your brain. So, if you see my stuff without sources...yea you better do your research yourself, anything that I did not give sources might be made up, might be fake, might be false, might be wrong, and you will have to do your research yourself. The only exception might be this post, because it is written based on self experience.

So, there's one term we use in academic writing - paraphrasing.

From Wordnik, paraphrasing means "a restatement of a text or passage in another form or other words, often to clarify meaning". To keep that short, it means rewriting something completely after you understand it. That is what scholars do when referring to other sources - they read the information they need, and rewrite it in their own words. This often involves the change of tense, the change of active or passive voices, change of words, and probably the entire sentence structure if you are good enough in it. I'm not that good, yet. Or, in certain cases, they will choose to directly quote it. By saying quoting, it means they directly copy paste an abstract of what they are referring into their text, and give the source of who said that. It can be done, but minimally. Plagiarism checkers doesn't like that, but it is perfectly fine to do it provided that you don't overdo it.

So if you are not very good at paraphrasing but you still need to refer to others' work, what should you do? Here's a quick paraphrasing guide that you might love. Not a very good one, but it works against Turnitin, the plagiarism checker of my school. Besides that, by doing all these, you are already putting effort and giving sufficient credit to the original author.

~1. Change the text into passive voice. Most of the times, the information you find on the net is in active voice. Or, if you cannot determine which voice it is but you still need to change it, you can just try to change the subject and predicate's places...slapping them all over the sentence and see which works.

For example, "Fishes have gills" - you just have to turn it to "Gills are one of the organs of fishes". "You can draw everything with a pencil" into "Everything can be drawn with a pencil", something like that. These are very easy examples and real life examples wont't be that simple, but you should know what I mean now.

~2. Give the source. If you're lazy, just make the text into a hyperlink to the original information source. Works 10/10. Else, you might want to do something like "according to [link to some site], there are more potatoes than humans on earth". This is what we call in-text citation, but probably that's a little too technical for Steemit usages.

~3. Here's the hard part. You are going to switch words so that the copy paste does not sound too obvious, and it is tricky. Sometimes your vocabulary just does not allow that. Don't worry, I don't have that vocabulary too. But, there's something called the thesaurus. It sounds like a dino, and it is as lovely as a cute dino (not anything from Barnie, thanks). Basically, you are going to highlight each word that seems like replaceable, then do a search on the thesaurus. There's an insanely high chance that you can find a replacement for it while not changing the meaning much, or does not change it at all. If you are using a text editor that supports this by just highlighting and right clicking (Libreoffice with some dictionary plugin I forgot), you will be fully addicted to it. I promise.

That's how I did my assignment last year. Plagiarism check returned 1% because I cannot replace certain scientific terms.

So, next time when referring to other sources, do what I said and you will be perfectly fine from Cheetah!

To be honest, I never expected stuff like these can be used out of academic writing. See you next time.

--Lilacse