(idea) by jessicapierce Thu Jun 08 2006 at 15:05:45

These days, our editorial staff is pretty much on top of plagiarism. Stolen or half-assedly altered text doesn’t stand a chance of making it to the bottom of New Writeups before at least one editor notices the offense. Back in the crummy old days this was not the case. Our staff was smaller, more scattered, and less able to communicate among itself and with users. When I was your age, we didn’t even have a Chatterbox.

For these reasons, and because the rules of kosher, legal noding were not yet set in stone, a lot of plagiarism slipped under the collective radar. I have recently been sorting through a lot of 2000-2002 material, and am finding abhorrent amounts of plagiarized work and violations of copyright. This ranges from very shitty paraphrases (altering a word in every other sentence does not make it original text), to credited but copyrighted text, to outright shameful copy-and-pasting claimed as the user’s own creation.

The worst news is, some of these long-fled noders are still much beloved here. One of them, I am surprised and sorry to say, was an editor. If these people were still active on the site I would be more than happy to work with them on rewriting their text. But they’re not here, so all I can do is delete.

I would be a bit of a wank if I started naming names of people who are not here to speak up for themselves. I am posting this log because I know at some point, somebody is gonna plotz over the overnight disappearance of half their favoritest noder’s body of work.

If you feel you might plotz, please pause before accusing the editorial staff, or me, of some kind of wack baseless secret mass deletions. Consider that past noders simply lived up to past editorial expectations, which were a lot more free & loose than they are today. I certainly copied and pasted in my fair share of cowboy slang and crop disease definitions, before I understood why that wasn’t cool. The difference is, I’m still around to remove my own mistakes, but these fled noders are not. So I’m sweeping up.

Fellow editors, if you have questions about any nuked writeup just let me know - I am keeping comprehensive notes as I track down plagiarized and infringey writeups. Some of them were hard as hell to ferret out (copied from now-defunct sources, etc.), but I’m not deleting anything until I am absolutely sure it’s a ripoff of someone else’s copyrighted work.

A great many of these writeups were long, impressively detailed biographies of various cultural figures. Over the years nobody has written anything here on Robert Frost, I assume because the guy already appeared to be well-covered. And he was; it was a lovely writeup. But it was stolen, so it’s gone. Similarly, we now have no writeups on ABBA, Shel Silverstein, David Mamet, or Nebuchadnezzar.

As always, if anyone runs into an apparently plagiarized writeup, old or new, by fled or active user, please feel free to msg me and I will be happy to handle it.

The following topics are empty or lacking as a result of this ongoing sweep. They are great starting points, if you're stumped or just bored. Please let me know if you fill any, so I can remove them from the list. More empty topics on my scratchpad.





And a whole bunch of dinosaurs:


I like it! 4 C!s