Welcome to the Power Users community on Codidact!
Power Users is a Q&A site for questions about the usage of computer software and hardware. We are still a small site and would like to grow, so please consider joining our community. We are looking forward to your questions and answers; they are the building blocks of a repository of knowledge we are building together.
Wasn't this deleted question salvageable?
A moderator unilaterally deleted https://powerusers.codidact.com/posts/285718, but isn't deletion overkill? Can't it be saved?
A moderator can simply add the necessary citations.
I don't think "a day" is a reasonable, workable deadline to edit a post. I may not be able to check this website for days, especially if I must stay overnight at a hospital.
2 answers
Plagiarism isn't something that we want to encourage. By "fixing" the post and having someone else add the required attribution, it sends the message to the OP that copying content from elsewhere is acceptable, which is absolutely not the message we want to be sending.
The help center contains the following:
Referencing online material
When you're referencing or quoting material that can be found online (such as Wikipedia or similar), please make sure to include a link.
Pay attention to what license the content is published under - for instance, Wikipedia licenses text under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, which requires attribution and a link back to the original source.
[...]
In any case, whether your original source is online or offline, please clearly mark the quoted material as being quoted from somewhere and is not your original content. This is done simplest with blockquote formatting (see the formatting help for help with formatting).
(emphasis from the original help center article)
(Writing this, I'm not actually sure what license we use for our docs, but since I wrote the original text used in the help center article I can put that aside for a moment.)
Even aside from the plagiarism issue, we don't want Codidact to just copy content from elsewhere. That's why we've largely moved away from importing Stack Exchange content - we need to create our own content, not pull it from elsewhere. Using content from elsewhere isn't sustainable for building our own communities, not to mention it wreaks havoc on our SEO. Copying content, even with the proper attribution, isn't necessarily something we want to encourage.
0 comment threads
but isn't deletion overkill?
As explained in comments, I deleted the post because the text is verbatim copied from two posts, which were published under the cc by-sa license, but you did not include the necessary attribution and you confirmed in comments that you are also not the author of these posts. This means reposting the text here violates the original license.
Can't it be saved?
Yes, you could have added the required attribution. This would not have made a good post, but at least it would no longer violate the original license of the posts you copied from. I intentionally waited a day before deleting, but unfortunately you did not add the required attribution.
A moderator can simply add the necessary citations.
You posted the plagiarised post. It is nobody's job but yours to make sure the necessary attribution is present.
0 comment threads
2 comment threads