Re: Freely changing Wikipedia articles [was: Re: again the verb "go+infinitive"]

LFS wrote:

Robert Lieblich wrote:

[ ... ]

I was astounded at how seriously the school took this. They couldn't
say that she hadn't credited the source, but they argued that she
should either have paraphrased the content or used quotation marks to
indicate that she was quoting passages verbatim. I couldn't argue
that they were wrong, but it struck me as an extreme overreaction to
threaten to withhold her degree (LL.M., an advanced legal degree)
because of it. We negotiated a settlement under which she would
rewrite the offending passages and have her grade on the paper lowered
by one letter (from A to B, as I recall).

Our instructions to students are explicit and emphasise that all
quotations must be shown using quotation marks, even if full references
are provided. If this has not been done, the work is immediately
referred to the Academic Conduct Officer who interviews the student. The
extent and seriousness of the offence is graded according to
predetermined criteria and there is a set tariff of punishment.

If the school had had such an explicit rule, even without the specific
sub-criteria, I wouldn't have been so surprised at the intensity of
their reaction. Of course, my legal training affects the way I see
things, and I acknowledge that to be fully ethical an author should
use quotation marks or block indents to indicate when something is a
direct quotation. I try always to do so. Since I can usually
recognize whether text is my own creation or someone else's, I'm very
unlikely to commit an error of quotation in the first place and very
likely to catch it if I do. (And I don't buy for a minute any of the
Scooter-Libby-style defenses of the likes of Stephen Ambrose or Doris
Kearns Goodwin.)

But we're talking about a student who conscientiously attributed what
she wrote to the author from whom she had taken it. There was no
explicit rule telling her to indicate verbatim quotations by some
recognized method. She's no dope, and she realized in retrospect that
she had done something inappropriate if not downright unethical. The
issue was the severity of the punishment, and I think the school
untimately came down about where it should have. Had there been an
explicit rule, I think they would have been justified in imposing more
severe sanctions -- some of which they actually threatened before
backing off.

This all takes a huge amount of time. It doesn't seem to deter the
determined cheats but causes immense stress for the students who come
from a different learning culture and find it very difficult to adjust
to ours. We also spend a great deal of time trying to teach students the
importance of proper referencing. You cannot imagine how tedious *that* is.

In this era of universal access to such a gigantic corpus of
knowledge, I don't know what's to be done other than to inculcate
ethical standards in as much detail and specificity as possible --
then do all you can to catch the cheaters.

--
Bob Lieblich
Puzzled
.

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