Decius wrote:
] ] Kelley's insightful window on the details of the war
] ] brought him increasing readership (118,000 page views on
] ] a recent day) and acclaim, including interviews in the
] ] The New York Times and on NBC's Nightly News, Newsweek
] ] Online and National Public Radio.
] ]
] ] The only problem: Much of his material was plagiarized --
] ] lifted word-for-word from a paid news service put out by
] ] Austin, Texas, commercial intelligence company Stratfor.
]
] He should attribute everything. That is the key.
] Unfortunately, he is still posting unattributed entries.

It would probably be worth clarifying this point for Memestreams, too, especially since we routinely quote other people's webpages word for word. Where's the dividing line between "fair use" quoting of someone else's page, and "plagiarizing" it?

Elonka wrote:
] It would probably be worth clarifying this point for
] Memestreams, too, especially since we routinely quote other
] people's webpages word for word. Where's the dividing line
] between "fair use" quoting of someone else's page, and
] "plagiarizing" it?

This is a very important question, and also an very hard one to answer.

Basically:

What MemeStreams users are doing right which the Agonist is not is that they always link the articles they are taking information from.

I think that you shouldn't quote too much text. If you are responding to an article, then you need to quote the content you are referring to, but in the case where you are merely recommending, you should quote enough text to show the reader what they are getting on the other side of the link, but not enough text to allow the reader to get all of the information without following the link. I think that 99% of the time, MemeStreams users do this well.

There may be cases where things are over the line here. Its obviously impossible for me to police it completely. For the most part it hasn't been a problem. No one has ever complained about being linked from MemeStreams and users seem to do the right thing almost all of the time.

Elonka wrote:
] It would probably be worth clarifying this point for
] Memestreams, too, especially since we routinely quote other
] people's webpages word for word. Where's the dividing line
] between "fair use" quoting of someone else's page, and
] "plagiarizing" it?

Tom nailed the key point right on the head.. You must attribute sources. MemeStreams give users the tools to do this.. Between linking back to the article, and the use of ]'s or italics to quote, the problem is handled fairly well.. You have a ability to quote verbatim content, it links back to the article, and I think its pretty clear that its a quote.. That nails 90% of this problem. The other 10% is the user, and how they form their post. If you want to be unclear about where something came from, you can of course be shady.. We can't stop people from being shady.. However, the community can spot people who are making bad posts and LART them. Integrity cannot be enforced by a peice of perl code, but it can be enforced by users.. So, hold people accountable for lies and plagiarism when you see it.. Community standards and all that..

I think this situation with Kelley and Stratfor shows that the blogging community is capable of enforcing itself. He appears to have been LART'd quite effectively. (This message is linked to one of his numerous apologies.) He appears to be attributing everything now, this serves as an example to others, an appropriate amount of damage has been done to his reputation, and a critical issue has been brought to light. Good for blogistan.

Back to MemeStreams.. We _do_ have a problem with it being unclear what comments came from what users when things get rerecommended.. Like many problems with MemeStreams, a solution has not been coded yet, but it will. In the meantime, its up to users to properly attribute comments to the people they can from. Yeah, I know its a pain in the ass.. Its likely going to be addressed at the same point when the capability to put links in posts is added.

There are a number of things that can be done to make the quoting system better.. Most of which require better tools on the client side for forming posts. For instance, when recommending the average story written in AP style, I usually quote the lead, and any sections that I feel are particularly relevant. The bookmarklet allows me to get a block of text to quote, but I usually wind up cutting and pasting an additional paragraph or two from articles to single out certain points.. Oped peices are rarely in AP style, hence they don't have a proper lead, and you need to pick a key point or two, a paragraph where the author sums up his peice, or simply paraphrase a description.. If I'm rerecommending something, I may quote different sections or "clean up" what material was quoted by the user I'm getting it from.. Sometimes I only single out a few sentences from a given paragraph and don't quote the... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Agonist & Meme Quoting