User:Renamed user g1luxev6mk/How to avoid plagiarism

This is a personal essay.

This is a personal essay.

When one contributes on Wikinews, it is important to avoid plagiarizing from the news sources one uses. This is because plagiarism is illegal and unethical, and plagiarized articles have so little chance of passing review without significant changes that some can consider them a waste of the reviewers' time. Although every good faith contributor here knows that he ought not to plagarize, not everybody on this website knows how that goal would be achieved. This essay will provide you with some tips on how to avoid plagiarism through examples.

One thing not to do

The most obvious thing that one must not do would be to directly copy from a source. Let's say that a bus plunged into a river somewhere, and that you've found two sources: an article from the Fictitious News Network, and another from The Popular Orange Vegetable . The worst thing to do would be to copy and paste everything from the first article, as well as everything from the second article that the first article missed, into a single Wikinews article. If somebody were to do this, then his article would be rejected from publication for plagiary.

Another thing not to do

Now that your first draft was rejected, you would probably try changing up the article a bit, thinking that that would constitute "putting the article in your own words." This does not work: taking an article and using some synonyms does not make it your article. You're still presenting your information in the same way as your sources, except with slightly different words, and that still constitutes plagiarism.

If you were to submit a draft which was plagiarized and subsequently slightly modified, it would not be published by any reviewer. The reviewer might modify your article slightly in order to make it slightly more distanced from its sources, but he cannot completely fix it as doing so would make him "substantially involved" with the creation of the article, and a reviewer "substantially involved" with writing an article cannot publish it, since it might create a conflict of interest in which the reviewer would publish a subpar article simply because he "likes it" due to being involved with it. Don't expect a reviewer to fix your article's copyright issue.

How you actually avoid plagiarism

Your article has been rejected twice, and it's almost stale, but you still try to learn how to avoid plagiarism. In order to avoid plagiarism, you have to "extract" the facts of the news event and present them in your own way; there are many ways you can do it, but I will only be showing you my method of doing it.

Take short notes no more than five words long, preferably even shorter, about the important facts; do not take long notes, as you are simply looking for facts, not how to present them, and taking absurdly short notes forces you to omit words and use obscure wordings, which in turn force you to use different words from those used by your sources when you turn the short notes back into an article. Then, organize the short notes into logical paragraphs; each paragraph would most likely end up as a mixture of facts from different parts of your sources. Ideally, you should try to add additional information to ensure that the Wikinews article would become more than just a synthesis, but that is not necessary. Finally, paraphrase the notes into a news article.

Typical notes based on the aforementioned articles

Lede:

Who:60 people killed (all aboard)

What:bus fell off bridge --> river

Where:Billsontown

When:Monday

Why:Unknown

How: Swerved, sharply turned right

Cause for crash/investigation:

-Authorities: still investigating, "can't rule out intentional"

-operator error likely

-Witnesses: bus = fast, road wet

-Company: to "be transparent in investigation"

Response:

-Paramedics dispatched

-person found alive; treatment stopped

-dumped into water; no explanation

Background info:

-Union workers complained; job action

-overcrowding, drivers lack sleep

-Anonymous: more dead than official 60

A non-plagiarized article

On Monday, a crowded bus carrying at least 60 people turned sharply and fell off of a bridge into a river below in Billsontown, Fictionalstateadelphia, killing everyone aboard. The cause of the crash is still unclear.

Witnesses said that the bus was driving quickly over a wet road. Authorities stated that the cause of the crash was most likely due to operator error, but they will also be investigating the incident with suspicion that it may have been intentionally caused. The company operating the bus, the Fictitious Transportation Company, said they are to be "transparent during the investigation."

Paramedics were dispatched to the scene. An anonymous paramedic said that one person was found alive, but treatment was ceased under an order from "higher-ups." The paramedic told the media that the person was ordered dumped into the water without any explanation from the authorities he was working under.

Unionized bus drivers working for the company are under job action, complaining about the company routinely packing more people than is allowed onto their buses and depriving its drivers of sleep. The aforementioned anonymous paramedic said more people were found dead than the official number of 60, and the number of people found exceeded the bus' capacity.

Other ways to use, rather than copy from, sources

The above method of avoiding plagiarism is only one of many methods of doing so. A writer might copy paragraphs from their sources and reorganize them in his own way, read the reorganized text to learn about the news story, and then write the news article while periodically checking the original sources for fact-checking. That method may make it less likely for the writer to miss nuances of a story than the method I mentioned earlier.

Conclusion

Plagiarism is the copying of somebody else's work and saying that it is your own, and on Wikinews, it often manifests as news articles copied from other sources with only minor changes. Plagiarism is illegal, and plagiarized articles have practically no chance of passing Wikinews' review process, but they still have to be reviewed; by plagiarizing, you are wasting the reviewers' time. As such, you should avoid plagiarism, and the way to do it is to extract the facts from a source and present them in your own way.