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> http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/03/09/college.president.ap/index.html
... which includes the hilarious comment: "I mistakenly assumed notes I
had made were my own ..."
Sounds suspiciously like an Orwellian forced confession that the emperor
does have clothes. Is it now a crime to forget something?
As I said, the academic culture of citation is something of a conceit,
promoted not least because authors get brownie-points for citations.
Their accuracy is given much less weight than their existence, as I have
frequently found by following them up.
I would have thought that uncited truth is generally more helpful than,
for example, cited untruth, but this notion almost runs counter to that
particular culture. Of course, no-one is disputing that cited truth is
the ideal, but with limited resources would you be better off spending
them checking the facts or finding the originator of the perhaps-not-facts?
I suspect that another reason for the obsession with plagiarism is its
increased detectability rather than its increased incidence. At least
the web does help one to find "other" sources for an item of
information, even if it doesn't do much to help establish which (if any)
may be the "first" source.
Some of the points that have been made are arguments not against the
bloggers but simply against trusting certain automated analyses (e.g.
page-ranking) of them.
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