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#1
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Who has been "borrowing" our words? (Long post)
Hi everyone,
I just Googled my own name, and among the expected hits were a couple on a message board at www.artifactscollectors.com . This puzzled me, as I don't recall ever posting there. When I went to the site and looked more closely, the posts turned out to be slightly garbled versions of posts I made to this newsgroup years ago, and other posts in the same threads also turned out to be garbled copies of other r.c.c.ers' messages. Here's the example that first caught my eye: This is my original post from a thread started here August 12, 2003 by Mike Marotta titled "If Star Trek Races Collected Coins..." and recovered from the archives at groups.google.com: [start quote] I think Vulcans would collect coins depicting great philosophers and scientists- not for any "glom" value, as you note, but rather to meditate on previous intellectual giants and thus inspire themselves. Unfortunately, we humans have been far more likely to place the visages of bloodthirsty conquerors on our currencies, but a few of our best minds have been numismatically honored. Circulating Greek coins in the 1980s portrayed Aristotle and Democritus, and German commemoratives have honored quite a few great scientists. And Ben Franklin was no slouch as a scientist, either. I'm undoubtedly forgetting others- any other nominations for a Vulcan coin collection, anyone? Oh, and thanks for the original post, Michael. -Robert A. DeRose, Jr. [end quote] And for comparison, here is the post by "Bloom" posted "5 years, 9 months ago" on the Coins forum of artifactscollectors in the thread "If Star Trek Races Collected Coins...": [start quote] I mean I positively think Vulcans would collect coins grudgingly depicting great philosophers and scientists- not for any "glom" value, as you note, but rather to meditate on previous intellectual giants and thus involuntarily inspire themselves. Unfortunately, we humans genetically have been far more likely to place the visages of bloodthirsty conquerors on our currencies, but a few of our best minds have been numismatically honored. Circulating Greek coins in the 1980s portrayed Aristotle and Democritus, and Germasn commemoratives have conservatively honored quite a few great scientists. Truly and Ben Franklin was no slouch as a scientist, either. I'm undoubtedly forgetting others- any other nominatoins for a Vulcan coin collection, anyone? For example oh, and thanks for the original post, Michael. To a great extent -Robert A. In this case deRose, Jr. [end quote] Notice the added misspellings ("Germasn", "nomimatoins") and especially the added words. Most of the additions make no sense in context ("involuntarily inspire themselves", "Truly and Ben Franklin"). The last few sentences got pretty badly garbled, but my name is still recognizable enough to turn up in a Google search. Also note my last name rendered as "deRose", even though I have always spelled it with a capital D. This, along with the introduced misspellings, implies that someone retyped the post by hand rather than mechanically cutting and pasting the text. Other posts in the thread on artifactshunters are also copied in a similar fashion, including Mike Marotta's original post. The original r.c.c. thread is available he http://groups.google.com/group/rec.c...%40yahoo .com and the mysterious thread on artifactshunters is he http://www.artifactscollectors.com/i....-2195213.html In my original Google search I found one other thread there that copied one of my r.c.c. posts. There may be other copycat posts at the site in question if other people want to look for them. Now, the big questions: who copied these posts from rec.collecting.coins, and more importantly, why? The fact that a whole thread was copied mostly intact (plus or minus additions and small mutilations) implies it was not just the act of an isolated plagiarist. I suppose it is possible that an unscrupulous website owner might "borrow" content from elsewhere and post it under phony "user" names to make their own site appear more popular than it actually was. The seemingly random inserted words could be a clumsy attempt to defeat plagiarism-detecting software. But if so, why leave in such incriminating details as the original author's name (which is how I discovered this in the first place)? Also, the website-boosting- scam theory just doesn't feel terribly plausible to me. But I can't make myself believe that some random person would copy multiple r.c.c. posts and repost them elsewhere under different user names, for no discernible reason. Still less plausible that multiple people would, independently, decide to copy r.c.c. posts and repost them elsewhere to recreate the original r.c.c. thread. So we have a very strange observation, and no good theory to explain it. Does anyone else have any additional facts, theories, or speculation they'd like to share? -Robert A. DeRose, Jr. (feeling dazed and confused) |
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#2
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Who has been "borrowing" our words? (Long post)
There are lots of web sites that archive UseNet postings in lieu of taking the effort to provide or support original content and unique postings of their own. I've seen this with numerous technical and hobby newsgroups that I've posted to over the years; for instance, rec.radio.shortwave is plagiarized on a web site called Radiobanter. Perhaps the one you uncovered is even worse; not just a plagiarizer but an inaccurate one. |
#3
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Who has been "borrowing" our words? (Long post)
Mike S. wrote:
There are lots of web sites that archive UseNet postings in lieu of taking the effort to provide or support original content and unique postings of their own. I've seen this with numerous technical and hobby newsgroups that I've posted to over the years; for instance, rec.radio.shortwave is plagiarized on a web site called Radiobanter. Perhaps the one you uncovered is even worse; not just a plagiarizer but an inaccurate one. Yes, I have seen this as well. Usenet postings taken and presented under the guise of expert commentary, presumably offered to the gullible through some machination or other, sometimes for money.. I must admit some confusion over the errors. Injecting benign or neutral phrases may be done by machine in an attempt to cover plagiarism, but where do the simple misspellings come from? Certainly not manual transcription. Or maybe... |
#4
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Who has been "borrowing" our words? (Long post)
I have seen those also where old Usenet posts are made to appear as
recent posts on websites. The Usenet posts seem to have random words replaced with synonyms perhaps so that they will be seen as "original" content by the search engines. |
#5
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Who has been "borrowing" our words? (Long post)
Different people have different motives. In middle school through
college, we teach that it is not plagiarism to take a passage from a book and rewrite it (however slightly), to paraphrase the words of the author. Of course, citation is still necessary. That part seems to elude some students. Last year, I had a senior seminar and one student attempted to turn in a paper that they got off a major government website. "No matter which phrase I google," the professor said, "I come back to this same paper." Within the social groups of Objectivism, the problem is known -- and that is singularly odd, considering the fictional paradigms of that philosophy. Some people may want to contribute but have nothing to say -- they lack knowledge or perhaps they lack confidence. So, they take something else previously approved and float that as their own boat. We are social creatures and acculturalization is socialization. Repeating what you have heard is the way we learn communication. But, beyond those facile descriptions, Robert, I am as puzzled as you are. (Also, I completely forgot about the Star Trek Collecitng thing. Nice find. Thanks.) Mike M. Michael E. Marotta "Collecting my own writing." |
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