What is the actual meaning of plagiarism?

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When one says this article is plagiarized, then what it means. I searched online to find out the actual meaning of plagiarism and got many definitions which more or less are same. I am going to show some definitions of plagiarism that I sourced from different websites:

Plagiarism is the "wrongful appropriation" and "stealing and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions" and the representation of them as one's own original work.

Sourced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#References

Plagiarism is defined as presenting someone Else's work, including the work of other students, as one's own. Any ideas or materials taken from another source for either written or oral use must be fully acknowledged, unless the information is common knowledge. What is considered "common knowledge" may differ from course to course.

Sourced: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-actual-meaning-of-plagiarism

The act of appropriating the literary composition of another author, or excerpts, ideas, or passages therefrom, and passing the material off as one's own creation.

Sourced: https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/plagiarism

Plagiarism is the act of using the work of another and passing it off as one's own. Also called cheating and academic misconduct.

Sourced: https://www.thoughtco.com/plagiarism-definition-1691631

According to above definition, you cannot use other thoughts or ideas, words and sentences to write your article. Even you can’t represent yourself as owner of someone’s work. But one question arises in my mind that if I am writing about a person who lived 400 years ago, then how I can add my own thoughts about him because the information that I will give in my article will be collected from several websites. In that case I can give the same information that I get from those websites by changing words and sentence structure. I can’t add some additional things as I can’t go 400 years back to gather some additional data about him. In this situation what should I do? Can I write the same information by changing the words and sentence structure? If I do that and add source will it be treated as plagiarism? I am little bit confused about it.

There are many topics where you can‘t be able to make changes there. Science topic is one of them. You can’t change Newton’s law. As far as I understand, you will have to write the same thing what Newton has written. You may have to give credit to Newton and if I give credit to him, I think that shouldn’t be treated as plagiarism. 

In my opinion, internet is a big platform where plagiarism can happen by mistake because there are many authors who are writing on the same topic. You will get more or less the same information but the words and sentence structure may be changed.

I remember when I was study in school; I generally used to write the same answer which was published in the book. Nobody told me that I was plagiarizing that time. 

In my opinion, there are many things that we can’t replace easily. Yes, we can add some own thoughts or ideas if we have deep knowledge about that topic. But proper source needs to be given, if you are gathering the information from some other online websites or books.

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