This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Raymond Lewallen. Original Post: Taking responsibility for plagarism Feed Title: Raymond Lewallen Feed URL: /error.htm?aspxerrorpath=/blogs/raymond.lewallen/rss.aspx Feed Description: Patterns and Practices, OOP, .Net and Sql Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Raymond Lewallen Latest Posts From Raymond Lewallen

Its nice to see SqlServerCentral taking responsibility and dealing with plagarism in a straight-forward manner. Hopefully something bad is happening to Kalpesh Thaker, the mentioned plagarist.

It's a big statement, but one that I feel needs to be made. Recently I received a couple of emails from concerned members of the SQLServerCentral.com community. It seems that an article that we published in January was plagiarized from Ken Henderson's The Guru's Guide to Transact SQL. As I was on vacation, I couldn't deal with it for a few days, and I needed to find my copy of the book to check the allegation. Before I could, Mr. Henderson emailed and confirmed just that.

I promptly removed the content and put a placeholder up there instead, noting there was a copyright issue. I then contacted Ken and he confirmed that two other articles submitted by Kalpesh Thaker were also plagiarized from his books and I removed them as well.

I am truly sorry that this happened and there is no excuse to be made. I do not check the submissions we receive against any type of full text search to see if they have been copied and I'm not sure that I can, but I thought that this release could serve two purposes.

First, a public apology to Ken Henderson for having his work out there for months without credit being given.

Second, I would like to let the community know what has happened. I'm hoping that you who read these articles will keep an eye out for this horrible practice of copyright violation. Since many of you are reading more SQL books than I, or perhaps more recently reading them, you'll be in a better place to spot this than I.

With the explosion of the Internet, the growth of SQL Server, and quite a few new book publishing companies, including ours, it's difficult to track down plagiarism. It's also created opportunities for many more people to write and publish works themselves. This means that many more people are out there creating articles and books than ever before.

However publishing something carries a responsibility as well. If you put your name on something, it needs to be your original work. Rewriting someone else's work is acceptable only if you have added additional value and substantially changed their work. If I wanted to write my own "Internals" book, the language would need to be my own. The chapters would be what I decided and they shouldn't mirror what Kalen Delaney wrote.

The same thing applies here. The author said that Mr. Henderson had done a better job of writing, so he just used what was in Mr. Henderson's book. That's not only illegal, it's very immoral. You are misrepresenting yourself and your knowledge as well as infringing upon someone else's work. If you didn't write it, don't take credit for it.

I offer no excuses for what happened and if there is anything that I can do to prevent it in the future I will.

Steve Jones

Steve mentions about doing full-text searches.  I’ve read in the past that colleges are doing this type of very thing to fight plagarism and duplicated term papers and essays submitted by students.  But what kind of resources are required?  What type of matches are required?  Is it a ratio of matched words:total words per page when doing searches?  What qualifies as plagarism?  Total complete copies, or do partial copies qualify?  If partial copys qualify, what is the percentage of copied material that qualifies text as plagarism?

These are questions I’m asking myself and would like your input.  What type of plagarism search solutions are out there?  I’m sure some of you in CS departments might be more aware, since I know that there are colleges that check this kind of stuff.  What can be done from SqlServerCentral’s capabilities to help them out to avoid these types of things in the future?  How are other publishing companies dealing with this?  If you’re a book author, how does your publisher, like Wrox, check for plagarism?

I occasionally post code, like this one here, that I didn’t write.  But I never, ever fail to mention who the author is.  I don’t understand the purpose in taking credit for somebody else’s work.  I would not like somebody else taking credit for my work, although I don’t go out looking to see if it happening.  Not a big deal to me if somebody copies my stuff, but yeah, I would like credit where credit is due.

Some topics, code samples etc are fairly generic, and have been written the same way by 100s of people.  Those don’t really count.  Aircode shouldn’t count.  Articles, complex pieces of code, like the sql example I gave, those should definately count as having been either original work of your own, or have credit given to the original authors ora bibliography or footnotes associated with them.