DCP's ongoing problem with plagiarism

[Dr Moore]

A link to an interpretor article was shared on Patheos Sic et Non yesterday. I haven't read the whole article, but here's a little snippet from the article:

https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/de-profundis/

Compare to the following from myjewishlearning.com:

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/repentance/

The students I most recently taught English to were are the grade 10-12 level.

That's a terrible example of paraphrasing that I would not let them off with. If they turned in something like that I would send them back to The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) to learn again about quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing, and how to properly cite sources.
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and ... index.html

He's still plagiarizing without citations? Unbelievable.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

More plagiarisms and absurdities from the article:

The average square foot of grass, for example, contains 3,000 blades

https://www.gardenguides.com/129203-man ... -foot.html

The average square foot of grass has 3,000 blades

An absurdity:

Imagine an elegantly clothed audience gathered at a cinema in a mid-sized American city for a double feature of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog and Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion.

Dekalog was a tv series consisting of ten one-hour episodes. -_- It wouldn’t be part of a double feature. -_-

Back to plagiarisms:

In the Hebrew Bible and in Jewish tradition, repentance is called teshuvah, a Hebrew word that can also be translated as “returning. One of the Hebrew words for sin is chet, which in Hebrew means “to go astray.” Thus, the fundamental idea of repentance in Jewish thinking is a return to the path of righteousness.

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/repentance/

In the Jewish tradition, repentance is called teshuvah , a Hebrew word translated as “returning.” One of the Hebrew words for sin is chet, which in Hebrew means “to go astray.” Thus the idea of repentance in Jewish thought is a return to the path of righteousness.

Aaaaaaand I just lost interest. The whole article is garbage, and if anyone cares it’s full of plagiarisms. I don’t feel like copypasta’ing the rest because I’m on an ipad and it’s a pain in the ass to do so.

- Doc

[drumdude]

I’ve been, umm, blessed over the past fifteen years or so, every single day of every week of every month, to be a principal focus of attention for a small group of anonymous online folks who scrutinize everything I do and say and write. They’re looking for evidence of real or perceived errors and wickedness. Most recently, they’ve discovered that the one-hundred-word twenty-third paragraph of my recent nearly-four-thousand-word essay “De Profundis,” a paragraph devoted to defining the Greek New Testament word metanoia and the roughly equivalent Hebrew term teshuvah, is verbally far closer than it ought to be to the respectively relevant articles, first, on Wikipedia and, second, on a website called My Jewish Learning.



And they’re right. And I’m surprised, somewhat perplexed, and, they’ll be delighted to know, embarrassed. I’m not exactly sure how it happened. I vaguely recall that I checked the Wikipedia article and the My Jewish Learning article in order to confirm my sense of the exact meanings of the terms. I wanted to check it against that of people who shared neither my background, my faith, nor my particular “agenda.” But I certainly didn’t mean to simply reproduce the precise language of those other people. What would I gain from that? After all, it’s not as if their precise language was particularly unique or elegant or eloquent. And it’s not as if I needed to look up the basic meaning of terms that I’ve known for decades. (I earned an undergraduate degree in classical Greek, and I took my first Hebrew course before embarking on my mission at the age of nineteen. And these are absolutely central words, not peripheral obscurities, in the New Testament and in the Jewish tradition.) Had I not already known the basic meaning of the two terms, it would never have occurred to me to look them up. I looked them up in much the same way, and for much the same reason, that I’ll sometimes, when writing, check out the exact meaning in the Oxford English Dictionary of a word that I use pretty much every day of my life.



Oh well. I can only apologize and make an effort to take pleasure in the fact that I’ve made at least one tiny group of online enthusiasts very, very happy today. In a world such as ours, that’s not a small thing. I freely plead guilty to the unforced error, but I won’t concede their eager imputations of depravity or corruption.

[Dr Moore]

He forgot to add the part in between looking things up and when the exact words appeared in his article.

That part is when he selected the text, hit control+c, then went to his working document and hit control+v, added a word or two, and continued writing.

Okay, that is the textbook definition of plagiarism.

An apology is a good thing, but leaving out the bit that needs to be apologized for, is an odd way of coming clean.

Like, a bank robber admitting to having gone into the bank and left with money that didn’t belong to him and then apologizing for, you know, and by the way he’s also puzzled - where did that money come from?

[drumdude]

I don’t really see why he wrote that apology. Who is it for? No professor is grading Peterson’s writing. He isn’t going to go to jail for plagiarism. Interpreter has no obligation to follow academic standards. Peterson doesn’t need to apologize to anyone, much less the people here he despises.

There are no penalties to Peterson or Interpreter for misrepresenting their garbage as academia. Nor should there be, free speech is an important right.

We, the dozen or so individuals who care enough to read them, are content to laugh about it and move on with our day. And so I have.

[Dr Moore]

I don’t really see why he wrote that apology. Who is it for? No professor is grading Peterson’s writing. He isn’t going to go to jail for plagiarism. Interpreter has no obligation to follow academic standards. Peterson doesn’t need to apologize to anyone, much less the people here he despises.

There are no penalties to Peterson or Interpreter for misrepresenting their garbage as academia. Nor should there be, free speech is an important right.

We, the dozen or so individuals who care enough to read them, are content to laugh about it and move in with our day. And so I have.

Promise you, nothing about this thread makes me "happy" or "delighted." I feel sorry for him. This self-imposed hamster wheel of his blog and Interpreter makes no sense.

What does the Interpreter even stand for anymore? What is the definition of success for the enterprise? Clearly, success is not defined by the highest-quality scholarship or publication of timeless material that will age better than critical arguments. I feel sorry for Dan and his Interpreter journal because it's all become a lame tabloid for a small population of believers. For everyone else, it's the ultra-ignorable thing near the checkout stand. I'd like him to do better. But like all media, Dan's journal is increasingly complicit in publishing a form of pornography. Cheap, but attractive at first glance. Sex sells because it excites, and excitement grabs attention, and attention is, well, attention. I think Dan has fallen for the age-old media trick. It's sad, incredibly sad.

[Tator]

Ditto Copy Pasterson seems to operate on the basis of, "You can't insult me, I'm too ignorant."

[Lem]

I’ve been, umm, blessed over the past fifteen years or so, every single day of every week of every month, to be a principal focus of attention for a small group of anonymous online folks who scrutinize everything I do and say and write. They’re looking for evidence of real or perceived errors and wickedness. Most recently, they’ve discovered that the one-hundred-word twenty-third paragraph of my recent nearly-four-thousand-word essay “De Profundis,” a paragraph devoted to defining the Greek New Testament word metanoia and the roughly equivalent Hebrew term teshuvah, is verbally far closer than it ought to be to the respectively relevant articles, first, on Wikipedia and, second, on a website called My Jewish Learning.

And they’re right. And I’m surprised, somewhat perplexed, and, they’ll be delighted to know, embarrassed. I’m not exactly sure how it happened. I vaguely recall that I checked the Wikipedia article and the My Jewish Learning article in order to confirm my sense of the exact meanings of the terms. I wanted to check it against that of people who shared neither my background, my faith, nor my particular “agenda.” But I certainly didn’t mean to simply reproduce the precise language of those other people. What would I gain from that? After all, it’s not as if their precise language was particularly unique or elegant or eloquent. And it’s not as if I needed to look up the basic meaning of terms that I’ve known for decades. (I earned an undergraduate degree in classical Greek, and I took my first Hebrew course before embarking on my mission at the age of nineteen. And these are absolutely central words, not peripheral obscurities, in the New Testament and in the Jewish tradition.) Had I not already known the basic meaning of the two terms, it would never have occurred to me to look them up. I looked them up in much the same way, and for much the same reason, that I’ll sometimes, when writing, check out the exact meaning in the Oxford English Dictionary of a word that I use pretty much every day of my life.

Oh well. I can only apologize and make an effort to take pleasure in the fact that I’ve made at least one tiny group of online enthusiasts very, very happy today. In a world such as ours, that’s not a small thing. I freely plead guilty to the unforced error, but I won’t concede their eager imputations of depravity or corruption.

[from Desert News,2013, in article explaining the plagiarism found in the Eyre's columns]

Kelly McBride, a senior faculty member for ethics at the Poynter Institute and co-editor of a new book on journalistic ethics in the 21st century, said writers accused of plagiarism often claim to have had a "note-taking problem."

"These are fairly egregious examples of plagiarism in that it's impossible to do this by mistake," McBride said. "The only way you can have that much identical material is if you copy and paste. I think you can identify intent by looking at the length of the plagiarized information."

...as accomplished professionals, the Eyres "certainly know what the expectations are when it comes to citation" — which they showed by sourcing some information in most of the problematic columns, McBride said.

Apparently, "they didn't want to have these really long quotes that demonstrated how heavily they were relying on source material rather than coming up with original thought," she said. "That is endemic of intellectual dishonesty that is a real problem in our culture today because it is so easy" to pass off comments or observations made by someone else as one's own....

https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php? ... type=CMSID

[drumdude]

What a coincidence! Even his note-taking excuse wasn't original!


The only people Dan needs to apologize to are the very rich Trump supporters that keep Interpreter afloat. He only needs to write for them.

Perhaps something positive about Trump, for a change. Maybe some apologetic argument for the idea that he actually won the election. I'm fairly certain Interpreter's Trump supporters don't give a damn about plagiarism or shoddy scholarship.


Dance for them, DP, dance!

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I wonder if he would’ve accepted his own excuses had they came from his students? #doubt #byuprofessor #priesthoodholder #templerecommendquestionabouthonesty

How many years has he been doing this, excusing his behavior, and blaming others for his dishonesty? It appears he can't *finger snap* get a handle on this plagiarism thing.

- Doc