Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2020 November 27

= November 27 =

Is there any online community collaborating on plagiarism exposé?
I remember hearing about a group belonging to scientific community checking on science articles for intellectual fraud. Is there any similar effort for humanities, like where a people can examine a doctoral thesis for its originality/fraud? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2405:201:F00A:208D:988C:CA7D:381F:927A (talk) 15:40, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Various plagiarism checking programs are available . 81.134.176.48 (talk) 16:56, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

That shoddy doc says nothing about what I raised. How can a institution of some standing have such a shoddy document as its policy? Point seven repeats point 6. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2405:201:F00A:208D:4CC9:D45B:57C5:544 (talk) 17:05, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
 * It's probably a deliberate copyright trap designed to spot fraudulent institutions that copy this document and try to pass it off as their own. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.197.26.5 (talk) 19:07, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Are you the original poster? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:15, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Yes. Should I register as a user to be considered a valid person? Is it OK to just make use of the non-registered user's option to edit? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2405:201:F00A:208D:D0F:6016:A160:EBBB (talk) 18:30, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
 * It depends on how much confusion you want to cause. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:05, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Unregistered users' posts are not inherently any more confusing than those of registered users. Neither are the posts of registered users who are not logged in. As long as they sign each post, which even registered users sometimes fail to do, and play by other rules, no problemo. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  20:48, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Except when 3 users with 3 separate IP's make comments, it's hard to know if they are the same guy or impostors. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:44, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
 * You've been around long enough that you should know that IPv6 addresses can jump all over the place Bugs. 199.66.69.13 (talk) 23:43, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Since you can't know whether the person answering the question whether they are one and the same is the OP or an impostor impersonating the OP, it is pointless to ask the question. --Lambiam 00:58, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
 * The document linked to by 81.134.176.48 mentions "Turnitin or similar programmes"; "Turnitin" sounds like a medicine for nausea but is a software program for plagiarism detection; see here. I think this is what respondent referred to when they said, "Various plagiarism checking programs are available"; I don't think they meant the policy at the Graduate School of ICL. Of course, plagiarism is merely one form of fraud, one that is relatively easy to detect. There have been fraudulent claims of archeological artefacts, but unless the fraudster is a dunce, debunking these is generally not possible solely on the basis of the description in an article; it requires examining the artefact itself. Using someone else's original ideas (but not their texts) while presenting them as one's own is not detectable with current technology; it requires familiarity with the earlier work. It may be hard to establish, though, that the duplication is not the result of an independent reinvention, and there have been instances where the earlier publication stole in fact unpublished ideas of the author of the later publication. In any case, the peer reviewers are also supposed to check for originality; given the number of somewhat arcane specializations, it is hard to see how an online community would do better than specialist reviewers. I cannot readily imagine other forms of fraud in the humanities. --Lambiam 01:32, 28 November 2020 (UTC)


 * To come back to the original question: In Germany, there are several Wiki-like sites that do check doctoral theses - IIRC, the first major one was GuttenPlag, which demolished Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg's thesis. It's now on Wikia, but no longer active. VroniPlag seems to be the successor, and even has a page at VroniPlag Wiki. Being able to put "Dr." in from of your name is quite a thing in Germany (and worse in Austria), so there are a lot of people who want to get the academic grade for the prestige, not out of intellectual curiosity, and they do tend to take shortcuts. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 12:06, 29 November 2020 (UTC)