[plagiarism] and attribution

Former U.S. senator and current president of the University of Colorado, Hank Brown's firing of University of Colorado Ethnic Studies Professor Ward Churchill followed a number of panels':

"two year's of investigations, to unanimously find a pattern of serious, deliberate and repeated research misconduct that fell below minimum standards of professional integrity. The panels found that Mr. Churchill rewrote history to fit his own theories. Ward Churchill claimed that he was singled out for his free speech."

In an excellent earlier article by Simon Caterson of the Melbourne Age, from November 20, 2004, the thorny question of plagiarism was scrutinized in some detail:

The offence committed by Australia's best-known plagiarist, the former Monash University vice-chancellor David Robinson, was not to borrow heavily from authorities in his work, but to fail to acknowledge every part of his work that was not original.

Robinson was forced to quit his post in 2002 after allegations of misappropriation dating back to the late 1970s and early 1980s were aired in a British newspaper.

I've just discussed this with one of the Russian girls who cleans my flat [another issue] a short time ago and she didn't know the word, even in Russian. When I explained and asked if students did this, knowing full well they did, she smiled and said, "Of course."

The accusation of plagiarism is in itself so rampant that one wonders what constitutes it and what doesn't. Simon Caterson cites:

Recent scandals in the United States involving disgraced journalists, such as former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, involved plagiarism as well as outright fabrication.

Joshua Green recounts [that] Senator Joe Biden was accused by … Governor Michael Dukakis, of plagiarising parts of a speech by the British Labour leader, Neil Kinnock. Further investigation disclosed that Biden had not only misappropriated the speech, but exaggerated his academic qualifications. As a prospective presidential candidate, Biden was finished.

The list goes on and on:

The Times Literary Supplement aired an allegation that Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was not quite the singular masterpiece it had appeared to be. It was known that Lolita was based on a novella called The Enchanter, but no one would think less of Nabokov for plagiarising his own work.

Enter the scholar Michael Maar, who uncovered a 1916 short story entitled Lolita, by a forgotten German writer named Heinz von Lichberg.

And:

Expatriate art critic Robert Hughes was accused of plagiarising the work of another art critic, Patricia Macdonald. Hughes promptly apologised: "To my embarrassment I seem to have cannibalised it, but it was entirely unconscious."

Welshcakes Limoncello gently raised the question with me about copyright on photos, which is a slightly different and yet in some ways a related issue. So let's get down to it.

I consider plagiarism must be deliberate or at least very, very careless.

Many students here lift whole passages from the internet and download them into their research papers, not mentioning one thing about their sources. You'd be drummed out for that in the west. Quoting anything at all unattributed, unless it is so well known there's no dispute, is another example.

Failing to include footnotes or including a "further reading" list at the end, hoping it will be assumed that all these books were read, is another example.

Where one problem comes in is with, say, Wiki. Everyone uses it. If a photo is posted with no attribution, that's where it came from. Many will say that's not good enough and even if you do link, is that enough?

Or the linking problem itself. Should every utterance by someone else be linked or can it just be mentioned as a hat tip? Or can the person just be mentioned in the passage?

And what about Robert Hughes' "unconscious cannabalism"? How many times have you written something quite witty you vaguely remember but it turns out to be someone else's quote? How many times have you written something all your own, an original thought from your own mind and horror of horrors, it appears someone else said it earlier [nothing new under the sun]?

Food for thought.

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