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May 27, 2006
Outing plagiarists
Some time ago I read that a university in South Africa was responding to students' plagiarism by posting their names on a hall of shame. Marios Alexandrou has made a similar move against those who have appropriated content from his blog. And when he outs his plagiarists, he posts not just their names but also all the information he can gather about them. Part of his response/retribution/revenge, then, is to diminish his plagiarists' privacy.
A funny aside: Just recently I was on the WPA-L list to inquire about that listserv's current sense of whether it is appropriate to cite posts on that list without requesting the author's permission. I won't reproduce my whole argument here. But I do have to note that one reader of that list thought I was suggesting that writers should be able to grab content from the listserv and use it without attribution. I was mildly horrified. At the same time, though, I have to admit that I was also mildly amused at the assumption that a plagiarism specialist would be advocating the unattributed use of others' text.
Posted by senioritis at May 27, 2006 08:11 AM