Avoiding Plagiarism on SteemIt
I've seen some stories on SteemIt that have been completely lifted, or stolen, from other sources. Copying and pasting whole paragraphs of stories without rewriting the content is blatant plagiarism and should be avoided. It's a good way to get flagged and lose steem reputation.
Photo courtesy of Google Search: SteemIt
Inserting a link to the story is not good enough. At the least, a Steemian can use quotes to indicate content that is not their own. It's even better to rephrase or rewrite the content entirely. The best policy is to do some of your own research from multiple sources and craft an original story, like in Sushi, Parasites and Stomach Pain, Oh My!
This goes for photographs and images as well. Provide a "courtesy of" tag to the image to indicate that it's not an original piece.
Steemians should not be thieves, and passing off someone's work as your own is plain and simple intellectual theft. You may gain followers by regurgitating other people's work at a break-neck pace, but in the process you lose credibility.
Social media sites like FakeBook are filled with those kinds of folks. Let's keep the content on SteemIt original, and let's accurately and diligently cite sources when we borrow from the work of others.
For more information on avoiding plagiarism, check out 6 Ways to Avoid Plagiarism in Research Papers. The article is academic-based, but its contents apply to stories created for SteemIt.
Steem on, Steemians (but do it responsibly)!
Mea culpa. I've never belonged to any social site in the last decade~God that makes me seem old, I'm not and should've known better. So what I've seen on others is link link link and copy. (Here even) I should've know THIS was not what Steemit wanted. Like a trained monkey....... Thanks for the heads up. Won't happen again.
Flagging posts is maybe the best way to police plagiarizers. You'll see a flag icon in the top-right corner of each story on SteemIt. I don't know how closely the SteemIt team monitors the flagging of plagiarized stories, but it seems to be the only method they give us to police other Steemians.
To support original content, I have started writing something humorous.
Not sure how well it will be received
Apart from that, I do reuse lots of animations - which are, unfortunately, not cited as there exists no original source.
Definitely supporting this idea! :)
Hmmm, maybe use a "not sure who made this, but it's my five-finger discount to you, my loyal Steemers!"
I had the idea for this post after clicking on a story from a fellow Steemian who had taken the first two paragraphs of an article and dropped them in as what would appear to be his own words. I only knew this because when I followed the link he had provided, it took me to the original article.
In doing a little research, I found that plagiarism is a huge issue on social media (surprise, surprise). I'm not sure how you would protect your original humor pieces, but a virtual shotgun or guard dog might be in order. :D
I have been in online marketing for almost 10 years now. While Google has some good policies to reduce plagiarism, Steemit is a different platform altogether.
Plagiarism will hurt its ranking, or so I thought. However, with fresh content pumped regularly here, Steemit is slowly gaining a strong hold in search ranking.
Although it has become a platform to shitpost almost anything as users are rewarded, I feel people will eventually get bored out of it and move on when the rewards are diluted.
And if we do the moon? Well, then, this place needs to be reorganized and new policies (can we even implement them) needs to be put forth.
This could not be more timely or over-steemed.
As a photographer, I imagine such plagiarism is extremely frustrating. With words, a simple search can quickly locate plagiarism (if you know to look for it), but an image is much more difficult to track down. I could see where it would make people leery of posting original images...at least their very best work.
You'd be shocked at the number of blatant image and video copyright infringements/theft I have dealt with over the years. To pour salt into the wound, people would even have the balls to crop the copyright watermark right out. Too many people are of the mindset that if they saw it on the internet, it's just free to take and use as they please.
On that note, I'm not even sure if what I wrote about providing a "courtesy of" statement is adequate when using someone's image. Would an embedded link also be necessary? I'm guessing this would depend on the image? Any insight you could give on this would be greatly appreciated.
Contact the photographer and get permission. Simple. Or if you need a certain image, contact a photographer you have followed and ask them if they may have an image close to what you need, and if you may use it free of charge. When I post my photography on social media, I just keep the mindset that it now belongs to the world...
I have a paid subscription to a photo site and occasionally use images from there for my Steemit blog posts when I don't have a good photo of my own. But I still do the "Courtesy of ..." line. It just feels wrong not to.
This is a great idea. We use a similar subscription service at work.
The proper thing to do in this instance by someone who feels the need to regurgitate other people's work, is get permission from the author of such work (written, photo, video, art, etc.) to re-publish it (Example: Reprinted with permission from the Oct. 26, 1984 National DRAGSTER). Sharing a link back to the original source in this equation would be better, and all news sources, video SHARING sites, and other outlets all offer these share/retweet/blah, blah, blah buttons. It's the copy/paste offenders who abuse this without permission and/or citing original sources, and then plead ignorance to the whole thing.
If people are making real money off of plagiarized work "published" on SteemIt, then surely a crackdown will come at some point.
Bingo. Being rewarded for original content should be the primary focus, and stated as such. Discouraging copy/paste hacks or a zero tolerance policy for copyright infringements should be noted too. The FAQ section would be a good start. There should be a landing page tab for do's and don'ts, things that will not be tolerated that everyone should read prior to signing up with a checkbox or some sort of digital signature acknowledging that they accept the terms of participation here. People need to be educated, and they need to respect the rights of those who are here or not. Three strike rule wouldn't be a bad idea either. Just my thoughts.
These are good ideas! Also, I've thought that SteemIt could operate as a self-policing community. Unfortunately, such action would not generate many followers.
The Quick Start Guide has a section on plagiarism, but it's fairly limited. Your ideas above would be a good start.