Achievement 3 by @buikem Task : Content Etiquette (Understanding Plagiarism)

Back in my college days, we had two professors who were sacked by my university, the University of Nigeria, and had their licenses revoked on account of plagiarism. And to think that one of them had only copied two lines from another persons work. So I was quite very familiar with the concept and scope of plagiarism unlike many people I have encountered on the subject.

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For some, it is not plagiarism if you paraphrase. For some others, as long as it is one or two lines, no one is guilty of plagiarism. And then there are the lot who are not even aware of such a thing as plagiarism. They could relate with piracy, but not plagiarism.

So what is plagiarism? There are so many definitions of the subject by scholars, which are all very valid, but I find the definition by the University of Oxford's more appealing because of its comprehensiveness. It defines it as "presenting someone else’s work or ideas as your own, with or without their consent, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement."
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This definition even covers the point I made earlier about piracy which refers to the unauthorised duplication of copyrighted material." ^Source

And how some believe that as long as I have the consent of the author, it is not plagiarism. But the definition above expressly debunks that notion. Getting permission is not enough, you have to acknowledge the source. And to do that you will have to make reference (s) to them.

Back in school, I was the leader of an advanced study group, Category A Initiative. Our goal was to achieve academic excellence both in character and learning. I had all three of the above categories of people in the group. And we took our sweet time to go through the subject and learn academic writing and citation using the APA referencing style 6th edition.

And when everyone got a good grasp of it, it started showing up even in our exam papers. We would give a definition and cite the author. It really impressed the examiners and we got that extra mark to our papers. I think I mentioned it in my book on 'How to Enjoy Your Exams; simple, effective ways to better grades'
You can get my book here:

https://bit.ly/HowtoEnjoyYourExams

And if you follow my blog, @buikem I will be doing a giveaway soon of 50 copies to 50 students on Steem community.

What am I saying? There is a touch of credibility and authenticity (and authority) giving references and making citations give to your article/paper that it would not have otherwise. It kind of validates your points, helping you sell your original ideas with little persuasion.

Seeing all these, one wonders at why anyone would rather plagiarise.

Given that articles and papers with more citations and references are received to be more credible and reliable, one wonders why in the world anyone would engage in plagiarism. And it is not surprising to find out that majority of people who plagiarise the works of others are oblivious to the concept of plagiarism. Some of them who know, have a misconception of the scope of plagiarism.

For one, I have met people who thought it was okay to copy and paste whatever you saw on the internet simply because it was there and they thought it had been put out their to be used by whoever finds it useful. Like you could help yourself with anybody's work. This is a typical case of ignorance.

Then there were these other set who believed that it was not plagiarism unless a substantial amount of the work is copied. That is to say, it would be fine if I lifted just a line from your work and made it mine. They argue, what could be the odds of two of us coming up with the same idea? Like friends complete each others words all the time, and two minds thinking in the same direction can arrive at the same expression. This is a case of misinformation.

Finally, accidents happen. An accidental plagiarism happens "when a person neglects to cite their sources, or misquotes their sources, or unintentionally paraphrases a source by using similar words, groups of words, and/or sentence structure without attribution."" ^Source

But irrespective of how it happens, plagiarism is simply an intellectual fraud that everyone should strive to avoid. Which is why I am glad about completing this achievement on learning how to add credibility to my blog articles using the markdown for citation. " ^Link

Everyone should learn this and master it. That way we build a reliable community of intellectuals.

To the attention of @cryptokannon. Thank you for reading my post.