Roger Davies: Plagiarist? Options

[A Horse With No Name]

A compliment for Ironholds? Oh my

Yes, kiddo, I never said that I disliked you!

Just another brick in The Wall. Just another chapter in The Book.

Nah, Eric, this is Alchemy 101. It seems like a lead brick, but those of us who don't plagiarize can spin it into gold.

[Deodand]

A compliment for Ironholds? Oh my

Yes, kiddo, I never said that I disliked you!

Just another brick in The Wall. Just another chapter in The Book.

Nah, Eric, this is Alchemy 101. It seems like a lead brick, but those of us who don't plagiarize can spin it into gold.

And those who do plagiarise spin it into massive amounts of bullshit .

[A Horse With No Name]

A compliment for Ironholds? Oh my

Yes, kiddo, I never said that I disliked you!

Just another brick in The Wall. Just another chapter in The Book.

Nah, Eric, this is Alchemy 101. It seems like a lead brick, but those of us who don't plagiarize can spin it into gold.

And those who do plagiarise spin it into massive amounts of bullshit .

And the ultimate joke is that no one is actually reading the articles that Roger ripped off. Talk about a wasted effort.

Pity that I never pursued animation as a career -- Roger Ripoff would be a great name for a cartoon character. Now if only Mr. Brandt can get a photo of Mr. Davies, then maybe we can get a comic strip going!

[NuclearWarfare]

Also, underage suck-up NuclearWarfare is rushing to close this matter while it is still in progress. How old is this kid, any way? Julian was kept off WR because he was supposedly under 16 -- how about getting an age check on NW, since he participates here?

That does not apply to me.

As for Roger Davies, I feel that if this plagiarism goes beyond a few articles (Moonriddengirl, MER-C, etc. would be ideal to check this out), he should resign from ArbCom at the least. In any case, I certainly don't feel that I am a "suck-up" to Roger Davies; in fact, I don't remember ever interacting with him before now. I just felt that the discussion would be better dealt with fully at another process while all the facts are gathered, rather than at a noticeboard for immediate administrator attention.

[CharlotteWebb]

I held then, and still do today, based on my own academic career, that what would have been better would have been to assign a short research paper, then pick them apart and show what was copy-pasted or a brain-dead recitation to the class. It's a lot more effective and makes people aware of how easy it is to miss a citation, leave out quotation marks, or forget that some specific language was not your own.

Based on my own (short-lived) academic career, I recall campus policies which dictated that anything an instructor deemed to be plagiarism was grounds for summarily issuing a zero (0.00) "don't bother showing up next week, see ya in the fall" grade for that course, followed by expulsion on the second such incident.

And no, that is not the rea$$$on I dropped out.

By the way -- who is Roger Davies in real life? Is he a serious academic, or is he another 16-year-old home schooled Wiki-addict? Inquiring minds want to know!

As far as I know he was one of the drummers for Spinal Tap.

Looks like they'll be rallying around him as they did this guy:



This post has been edited by CharlotteWebb: Tue 23rd February 2010, 4:21am

[NuclearWarfare]

No connection to wine (http://www.rogerdavies.com/tag/roger-davies/) or Harry Potter (http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Roger_Davies), I'd assume. He seems to be an older gentleman from Europe who does Wikipedia as a hobby. There's quite a lot of those.

[A Horse With No Name]

Also, underage suck-up NuclearWarfare is rushing to close this matter while it is still in progress. How old is this kid, any way? Julian was kept off WR because he was supposedly under 16 -- how about getting an age check on NW, since he participates here?

That does not apply to me.

So how old are you?

Looks like they'll be rallying around him as they did this guy:

Yeah, but that bony character had a va-va-voom girlfriend -- we can overlook his trespasses as long as she gets to trespass among us!

[Deodand]

Also, underage suck-up NuclearWarfare is rushing to close this matter while it is still in progress. How old is this kid, any way? Julian was kept off WR because he was supposedly under 16 -- how about getting an age check on NW, since he participates here?

That does not apply to me.

So how old are you?

Looks like they'll be rallying around him as they did this guy:

Yeah, but that bony character had a va-va-voom girlfriend -- we can overlook his trespasses as long as she gets to trespass among us!

Personally I prefer it when "va-va-voom" women follow the Lord's Prayer and trespass against me. Just a personal opinion, though.

[A Horse With No Name]

Personally I prefer it when "va-va-voom" women follow the Lord's Prayer and trespass against me. Just a personal opinion, though.

Which one of us is the pastor around here, hmmm?

Besides, I wouldn't mind rehearsing Ryan's girlfriend in "I Don't Know How to Love Him" -- she'd be a great Mary Magdalene in the WP version of "Jesus Christ Superstar" (with Larry Sanger as Judas and Jimbo as JC...but I digress).

[tarantino]

Here's his self-descriptions.
London-based writer and Anarcho-syndicalist.

From Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee_Elections_December_2008/Candidate_statements/Roger_Davies/Questions_for_the_Candidate

Former publisher of two magazines. Former head of a creative department (14 prima donna staff). Former head of a public relations department (and the complaints department). Magazine bureau chief. Negotiated numerous high value contracts. Liaised with clients/suppliers in the US, Canada, Scandanavia, France, Spain and Germany. Otherwise, my wiki contributions as a coordinator speak for themselves.

[Deodand]

Personally I prefer it when "va-va-voom" women follow the Lord's Prayer and trespass against me. Just a personal opinion, though.

Which one of us is the pastor around here, hmmm?

Besides, I wouldn't mind rehearsing Ryan's girlfriend in "I Don't Know How to Love Him" -- she'd be a great Mary Magdalene in the WP version of "Jesus Christ Superstar" (with Larry Sanger as Judas and Jimbo as JC...but I digress).

Surely Jimbo would be the Father, and Larry Christ?

Interviewer "so, could you resolve the status of our lord Jesus, please?"
Jimbo: certainly, he was merely an aide during the early second century"
Interviewer: "excuse me, but early documents show you referring to him as your son, and an element of you? I quote John, chapte-" *FWOOM*

[A Horse With No Name]

Surely Jimbo would be the Father, and Larry Christ?

No, you don't know your musicals. Sanger as Judas and Jimbo as JC (not Julian Colton). After all, Judas' song sums up the WP experience: "Every time I look at you I can't understand, how you let the things you did get so out of hand..."

[Deodand]

Surely Jimbo would be the Father, and Larry Christ?

No, you don't know your musicals. Sanger as Judas and Jimbo as JC (not Julian Colton). After all, Judas' song sums up the WP experience: "Every time I look at you I can't understand, how you let the things you did get so out of hand..."

Na, it's the Wikipedia version! "Every time I look at you I can't understand, how you let the things you didSALLY SUCKS COCK LOLOLOLOLOL"

[Lar]

So... everyone's getting spun up to tear Roger Davies down, is that it?

Count me out.

I think he's one of the better, saner, arbs, who has in his time on the committee written a lot of sound decisions and overall done a lot of good. I'm not sure I see where the actual harm in incomplete rewrites comes in, although I agree it ought to be corrected. But I have every confidence it will be corrected.

Strikes me this is some trumped up witch-hunt rather than anything worthy of serious consideration. Consider the source. And make sure you're going all the way back up the food chain, assuming that's learnable.

[EricBarbour]

I don't really wish to attack him, because you're right, he's not a bad administrator.

(That said, I found this to be disturbingly funny. Yes, I suck.)

[Peter Damian]

According to my dictionary (dictionary.com) plagiarism is "the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work.

It is misrepresentation that is the key. I actually quoted the dictionary almost verbatim: it says "the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work". But as I used the words 'according to my dictionary (dictionary.com)' I was not representing the statement as my own. The misrepresentation and effective stealing of another's work is the key to whether it is plagiarism or not. This is quite different from copyright violation. Suppose I publish a chapter of someone else's work, with full attribution, but without permission. That is not plagiarism (because I have attributed the work as someone else's). But it is certainly copyright violation.

Paraphrasing (as Davies did) is still plagiarism, because it is taking someone else's thoughts or ideas. Even taking an idea, and expressing the same idea in a wholly different way, is plagiarism. But in nearly all the cases I looked at, Davies correctly attributed the source. So he wasn't misrepresenting someone else's ideas as his own. So what's the problem?

[the fieryangel]

So what's the problem?

The problem for Wikipedia isn't a moral problem, but a legal one. In order to release these things into a free license, the work has to be free of copyright.

The bottom line is that words (in a specific order, using specific phrases) can copyright, but ideas can't. In a musical composition, in order to prove copyright infringement you've got to show that seven notes in the theme line up with the protected work, which Yoko Ono discovered in her song "I'm Your Angel" which was found to be "similar" to "Makin' Whoopee"... I'm not certain what the standard is in written prose. Maybe Horsie knows?

If he's just paraphrasing somebody else's ideas and the prose is completely unrecognizable, then there isn't a problem. If you can find entire phrases that only vary in small ways, you've most likely got a copyright problem.

The rest, in my opinion, is just more of the WP drama that feeds the beast...

[thekohser]

So what's the problem?

The problem for Wikipedia isn't a moral problem, but a legal one. In order to release these things into a free license, the work has to be free of copyright.

It really does come back to TFA's analogy of the worker bees, gobbling up copyrighted content, chewing it up a bit in their mouths, then -- voila! -- spitting it back out under a free license.

When content is plagiarized word-for-word, even with a citation, do you think that (without quotation marks) the rest of the content-scraping world is going to recognize that that sentence or two was not wholly thought up from scratch by a free culture disciple? Of course not. They're going to auto-magically scrape away, and now the hard work of that original author is his problem to go track down all over the Internet, saying, "You've misappropriated content from my book."

Thanks, Roger Davies. Thanks, Wikipedia!

[Peter Damian]

Obviously I'm not making any sense. Let me try again. There are two separate things: copyright violation and plagiarism. You can commit the first (by citing extensive tracts of a work with attribution) without committing the second. You can commit the second without committing the first (by copying a short passage verbatim, without attribution).

Look in any scholarly work and you will find short, usually indented passages, containing quotations from other writers. This is normal, and is welcomed by the 'other writers' because it counts as a citation, and it publicises their work. If the passage is too long, then it is a copyright violation, because it has given the reader access that is so complete or extensive that there is no reason to look up or purchase the cited work. There is no hard and fast line here: you can find great bleeding chunks of text in some scholarly works. I will try and find examples. The point is that plagiarism is the failure to attribute.

Copyright violation by contrast does not involve failure to attribute, but rather the (extensive) reproduction of the work of another, without permission. Thus the key words are

Plagiarism: no attribution
Copyvio: no permission

[the fieryangel]

Copyright violation by contrast does not involve failure to attribute, but rather the (extensive) reproduction of the work of another, without permission. Thus the key words are

Plagiarism: no attribution
Copyvio: no permission

You understand this. I understand this. But from what I'm reading in the discussions involving this issue on Wikipedia, nobody there understands this difference and what each situation means.

That is the problem. They don't understand the question, yet they're all screaming "plagiarism" when they really should be discussing "copyvio".

As far as I can see, the WP system is ALL "plagiarism", given the way it works. I don't see how they could "generate" this "free content", without plagiarism taking place.