[Air-L] Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age

Matthew Bernius mbernius at gmail.com
Mon Aug 2 15:12:45 PDT 2010


Gerry,

Of that entire article, I thought the most provocative and interesting
statement (which opens up completely different questions than the majority
of anecdotal evidence brought to bear) was this one:

"And at the University of
Maryland<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_maryland/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia
<http://www.wikipedia.org/>in a paper on the
Great Depression<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/great_depression_1930s/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>said
he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not
need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as *common knowledge*."
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/education/02cheat.html?_r=1&src=tptwempahsis
mine]

Granted, the outright copying and pasting of texts is problematic. That
said, the argument that posts on Wikipedia constitute "common" knowledge is
an claim worth seriously considering. What is the relationship of
crowd-sourced information to "common" knowledge? What if the situations was
changed a bit and the student was reproducing dates and facts, not whole
text passages, out of wikipedia and supported their lack of sourcing with
this claim.

- Matt

ps. I write this as someone who hasn't had a problem with students sourcing
facts from Wikipedia.

-----------------------------
Matthew Bernius
PhD Student | Cultural Anthropology | Cornell University |
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/anthro/
Researcher At Large | Open Publishing Lab @ the Rochester Institute of
Technology | http://opl.cias.rit.edu | @ritopl
mBernius at gMail.com | http://www.waking-dream.com | @mattBernius



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