How We Can Fight Plagiarism on Triond

Plagiarism. Should we report it? You might feel inclined to let it slide… they might not have known better, right? Maybe it’s only that one article. Or perhaps it’s too much hassle to file a report against a suspected plagiariser… if Triond can’t catch the plagiarisers, why should we do it for them?

The correct answer, of course, if that we should always report plagiarism, even if it’s only for one article. A few days ago I noticed that a user – who shall remain nameless – who posted about fifteen low-quality articles a day had a writing style that was very inconsistent. In one article his English was broken, in the next it was native standard – at one point he was a man, the next point the narrator was female! I started to suspect at this point, but didn’t do anything – after all, what if they weren’t a plagiariser and I wrongly reported them and got an innocent person banned?

My mind wouldn’t let it rest though. Eventually I opened an article that looked very suspicious, Googled the first paragraph and found that the user had copied and pasted the whole article verbatim from an article written several years ago – all he had done was to remove the original author’s name.

I was ANGRY. How dare he make money from other people’s hard work? Even if he was just making a few cents a day, those few cents weren’t lawfully his. Upon looking at his profile and checking out a few more of his articles, I came to the conclusion that a large majority if not the whole of his ‘work’ was simply copied from somewhere else and posted under his own name. So what did I do? I reported him on the Triond help page, Get Satisfaction, citing his copied article and the evidence that it wasn’t his own work, and a few days later his page was removed.

I caught a plagiariser!

Plagiarism is wrong for so many reasons. Apart from the obvious – making money from someone else’s work – it gives all of us self-published authors a bad name and could ultimately bring the industry down with it.

Have you seen any plagiarisers around? If you think you have, I strongly urge you to report them to the Triond team, who will remove the offending article, possibly ban the user from publishing or as in this case remove their account completely. Remember – plagiarism harms us all.

50 Articles On Triond – What Next?

How To Ruin A Writing Career Overnight

Ten Of The Hottest Triond Topics

Sign up for free at http://www.triond.com/rw/493482 and earn money for publishing articles.