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Egregious, Highly Risky Plagiarism

Euthanasia Machine

Putting a plagiarizing computer out of its misery...

(Image from Wikipedia)

What's a professor to do? I warn students that I can easily catch their plagiarism, for I can find by Google in an instant the same passage that they may have sought for hours, but despite my warnings, they download material from the internet.

One student of mine is writing on euthanasia and had previously copied material from online for the essay assignment's introductory paragraph:

The first gas chamber was designed by professors of psychiatry from 12 major German universities. Psychiatric patients were executed until the hospitals were almost empty. They were joined by some pediatricians, who began by emptying the institutions for handicapped children in 1939. By 1945 almost 300,000 Germans were killed. By then, these doctors were killing bed wetters, children with misshapen ears, and those with learning disabilities.

This passage had been borrowed from a website titled League for Life in Manitoba, which cites page 47 of Fredric Wertham's The German Euthanasia Program (Cincinnati, Ohio: Hayes Publishing Company, 1977), but neither of these sources had been cited in my student's assignment.

I gave the student an "F" for plagiarism and in turn received some green tea and a promise of no more plagiarism. The green tea was some sort of Confucian gesture intended to bring the student-teacher relation back into harmony (in the interests of a harmonious society, of course). The promise was a perfunctory expression of good will that I've learned to ignore.

And a good thing, too, for the first draft of this student's essay has this truly egregious instance of plagiarism:

The pain and suffering a person feels during a disease, even with pain relievers, can be incomprehensible to a person who has not gone through it. Even without considering the physical pain, it is often difficult for patients to overcome the emotional pain of losing their independence. Moreover, despite modern painkillers, there is little available to deal with the problem of 'breathlessness', which makes many ailing patients feel they will suffocate.

This passage comes word-for-word uncited from a section titled "Reasons given for voluntary euthanasia" in Wikipedia's entry on "Euthanasia" -- and that despite my having forbidden not only plagiarism entirely (of course) but even the use of Wikipedia as a source at all!

By the student's logic, this doubtless constituted a case of plagiarism made necessary to resolve a dilemma:

Teacher forbids plagiarism. Student needs Wikipedia passage. Teacher forbids Wikipedia. Student nevertheless needs Wikipedia passage. Teacher forbids Wikipedia. Student must plagiarize Wikipedia passage.

I must admire how the student has taken this load of bull by the horns and courageously plagiarized, for students must speak their minds even if their words are unutterably borrowed.

Yet, if these specific points about euthanasia were so necessary to make, why not go to Wikipedia's sources?

The Wikipedia entry cites the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for "Voluntary Euthanasia," which has the following passage in the fourth paragraph under point "2. Five Individually Necessary Conditions for Candidacy for Voluntary Euthanasia":

The third condition recognises what many who oppose the legalization of voluntary euthanasia do not, namely, that it is not only release from pain that leads people to want to be helped to die. In The Netherlands, for example, it has been found to be a less significant reason for requesting assistance with dying than other forms of suffering and frustration with loss of independence.

I found this source easily because the Wikipedia entry provides a link to it. Similarly, the entry also links to Jeremy Laurance's article, "Death on prescription?" The Independent (London, May 13, 1999), which says:

Dr Christopher Hindley, a GP in east London who works in a hospice, and claims to have assisted several patients to die at their request, says dealing with pain at the end of life has largely been solved. "It is amazing what we can do -- pain has ceased to be a major problem. What people fear most of all is breathlessness, not pain. They don't want to suffocate. The palliative care movement admits that that is a very difficult symptom to deal with."

These useful and legitimate sources were only two links away and would have quickly solved the student's 'dilemma' so much more elegantly.

Why, then, did the student not do this and thereby avoid this malingering, academic demise?

Okay, here's the secret...

Ernest Tubb

Better songwriter than Rowling?

(Image from Country Music Hall of Fame)

...to selling as many books as Rowling has and becoming the next big thing.

Write the first several pages of your own 'chosen one' story and try it out on Digg.

What's Digg? On this one, we can trust Wikipedia:

Digg is a community-based popularity website with an emphasis on technology and science articles, recently expanding to a broader range of categories such as politics and entertainment. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control.

News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. This differs from the hierarchical editorial system that many other news sites employ.

But if you don't trust Wikipedia -- and why should you since even you can edit it! -- then go look at the Digg site itself, which will tell you:

Digg is all about user powered content. Everything is submitted and voted on by the Digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote stuff that's important to you!

Dig it? Everything is submitted and voted on. Hmmm ... everything? Even this description of what Digg does?

Leaving that meta-recursive question aside, one can instantly see the applicability of Digg for testing the popularity of one's stories. This is a bit like market research, I suppose, but more empirical.

Brent Stinski, formerly a doctoral student at Cambridge University working on a doctoral thesis about the psychology of art and entertainment, has had the same idea and has set up Media Predict, a website that tests the popularity of creative works in various media (among the other things that it tests), so you could also try posting your stories there, I reckon.

If only this had been available to Ernest Tubb, who had to labor in vain for six long years and seven failed records before hitting paydirt in 1941 with the country single "Walking the Floor Over You." Why, he could have waltzed across Texas several times in the years that passed before he became successful! But if he'd had access to Digg or to Media Predict, then he could have just waltzed right out the door and laughed all his wealthy way to the bank with popularity as immediate as that of Rowling.

So, that's the secret to selling as many books as J.K. Rowling. Just test them first using Digg or Media Predict. And send that $50.00 that you owe me to my Kyung Hee University address.

Some may suggest that I've not really revealed the crucial secret, namely, how to write that bestseller in the first place, that I've merely revealed a clever marketing technique. True -- and thanks for calling me clever -- I did promise to reveal that "crucial secret to writing a hero's tale that sells millions and rakes in billions," didn't I?

Well, here's the crucial, terrible secret: Nobody Knows.

"Wikipedia is Good for Academia"

Wikipedia

(Image from Wikipedia)

U.C. Davis history professor Eric Rauchway has written a defense of Wikipedia for The New Republic: "Wikipedia is Good for Academia" (3/21/2007).

It's a learned piece with an interesting argument on the changing ways in which knowledge has gotten disseminated over the centuries:

People with money, reputation, and control over public information have historically used their power to retain control over the means of producing knowledge, as the philosopher Jürgen Habermas noted. To crudely reduce Habermas: In the Middle Ages, the only public things were the symbols of authority, displayed to the people by kings and the Church, who told them what to think and do. As market towns arose, so did a new public culture. Now information didn't just move down from above, it moved horizontally and, by the seventeenth century, vigorously: in print journals and coffee houses and also (as my former colleague Peter Thompson would point out) in taverns where political and literary discourse flourished.

As Habermas noted, the rise of public opinion annoyed the experts. "The conflict about lay judgment, about the public as a critical authority, was most severe ... where hitherto a circle of connoisseurs had combined social privileges with a specialized competence." But, once public, knowledge became so cheap to make and spread that it demanded attention. Everyone who was anyone was reading and listening. And, throughout the period of liberalization in the West, the great and good, the ambitious and the worthy, learned to reckon with "the sense of the people."

The rise of the modern state and the expensive apparatus of modern media undid this revolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Al Gore noted, borrowing from Habermas, it meant a "refeudalization of the public sphere."

Now the Internet is defeudalizing it again. There's no point romanticizing what's going on--defeudalization doesn't mean democratization. Like the coffee-house culture, the Internet's public sphere is noticeably male, crude, and given to the concerns of the rich middle class. But it's not subject to the control of press barons, either.

I largely agree with this assessment of how knowledge has gotten 'democratized', and I'm all for Wikipedia as a resource in learning. I draw the line, however, in allowing it as a source for student papers -- though I'd allow such online encyclopedias as The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for it is a professionally peer-reviewed work. This raises the issue of accuracy, and Rauchway comments on the charge that Wikipedia is inaccurate:

On examination, this argument has itself proved inaccurate. As Roy Rosenzweig wrote, "Wikipedia for the most part gets its facts right," and contrariwise, "[y]ou can find bad history in the library." In pitting Wikipedia against the Britannica, Nature found that:

The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.

If you care about accuracy, you don't want to take up the cudgels against Wikipedia. Nor should you if you care about the free production and promulgation of information.

If true, these are excellent and even telling points -- about Wikipedia's science articles. But on non-science articles, Wikipedia can be terribly inaccurate, as has been not only claimed but also demonstrated in one of Maverick Philosopher William Vallicella's blog entries and the accompanying remarks by commenters.

One point often raised in defense of Wikipedia as a source is that it can be corrected -- and often is corrected. Even granting -- for the sake of argument -- that this is the case, the fact that Wikipedia can be 'corrected' at any time means that it can be rewritten at any time, so how can one cite it as a source? By the time that a student's paper reaches my desk, the Wikipedia article cited may have gone through several changes, so how can I verify the student's accuracy -- or even veracity? I am not raising an abstract academic point; I'm raising a concrete academic point. I've encountered this very problem in student papers that -- despite my repeated warnings -- have cited Wikipedia. By the time that I checked the Wikipedia articles, the material cited had been altered.

So, I'll stick to my rule: Wikipedia as a resource but not as a source.

Something baffling about my Korean students...

Wikipedia

Don't use this 'wicked encyclopedia'...

(Image stolen from Wikipedia)

I'm busy correcting and grading the first drafts of my students' essays, and something that most of them have done has quite baffled me.

Several times during the semester, I warned my students against using Wikipedia as a source, explaining how Wikipedia works, that it has open editing for its articles, which means that articles can undergo editing by anyone, that articles can change at any time, and that articles will not meet academic standards of reliability.

So ... what have my students done? They've used Wikipedia, of course.

Now, I happen to like Wikipedia -- as anyone who reads this blog knows -- and I cite it all the time in my blog entries, but this blog functions as a freer space for brainstorming on my speculations and musings, not as a scholarly format for serious publication.

The occasional visitor who pops in here without realizing how I use this blog can get annoyed when I don't meet scholarly expectations. For instance, I had an anonymous reader last spring who combed my musings obsessively, looking for the even the smallest degree of inconsistency, and accusing me of various sorts of intellectual sins. I finally grew tired of him, decided that he was an odd sort of 'troll,' told him so, and -- to my astonished joy -- got rid of him that way.

In short -- and to return to my point -- I'm not trying to meet scholarly standards here, so I can use Wikipedia if I want.

But my students had better not use it on their academic papers -- as I have repeatedly warned.

Yet, they have done so, and when I've delved into this with them, I discover that they did listen to my warnings and that they do know that they're not supposed to use it.

"So, why did you use it?" I ask.

A weak smile appears, but no explanation is forthcoming, merely a "Sorry."

"Well," I reply, "then you must be expecting a 'sorry' grade."

And that's precisely what they receive.