BACKGROUND
This policy proposal was prompted by two Disciplinary cases related to plagiarism. In the first, Metaphysician received a permanent ban (subsequently reversed) for failing to cite quotations from a text in the public domain, in a case where citation was not obviously required. More recently, Disciplinary has been obligated by the Site Charter to investigate a member of staff for failure to attribute portions of an external work with a compatible license. There has been a general consensus among staff that these matters should have been handled in a way that did not involve the disciplinary process. Current site rules don't provide for that.
I'm proposing the Disciplinary Team portion of such a procedure here; the Licensing Team will also propose a procedure for their handling of plagiarism cases that they would be responsible for under this new division of responsibilities.
PROPOSAL
"Plagiarism" as used here incorporates any failure to properly attribute or obtain permission for the use of some or all of an external work, as well as any violations of site plagiarism policy. Instances of plagiarism will normally be handled by the Licensing team and recorded in non-disciplinary records on 05Command. Under some circumstances, the Disciplinary team will investigate plagiarism and, when necessary, impose punishments pursuant to site rules. An investigation by the Disciplinary Team should not be taken as a guarantee that a user will be punished.
Instances of plagiarism will only be considered Disciplinary matters (meaning the Disciplinary Team will handle such cases) when one or more of the following applies:
- Dishonesty
- Example: A user downloads an image from imgur and includes it in an article they wrote, claiming to have been the creator of the image. The image is found to have been taken from a photographer's website, and the photographer confirms that they are not that user.
- Example: A user posts an article containing an image with correct attribution to a non-CC source. They falsely claim that the creator of the image gave them permission to distribute it on the site under CC BY-SA 3.0. A takedown request is subsequently received from the original creator, who claims permission was never given. When asked to substantiate their claim of having been permitted to use the image, the user cannot.
- Example: A user posts an article incorporating several sentences of what appear to be slightly-paraphrased text from a published novel. When questioned by staff, the user claims that this was a coincidence.
- Pattern of behavior: If a user continues to plagiarize after having previously been warned by Licensing. If a user already has one Licensing warning for plagiarism within the past month or two within the past year, subsequent instances within that time frame will be treated as Disciplinary matters. For purposes of this rule, a warning will be considered to encompass all instances of plagiarism between the prior warning, if any, and the date the warning was issued. Any new instance of plagiarism after the posting time of the 05command post shall be counted separately.
- Non-example: If someone writes three articles and improperly cites images in all three, but Licensing staff only notices and requests a modification after the third article is posted, that will count as one instance, not three. This is true irrespective of whether the three articles are investigated simultaneously by Licensing or whether they have separate entries in the 05Command record.
- Example: A user posts an article on Monday. On Tuesday, Licensing notices that the image in that article is not properly cited. The user corrects the citation. On Wednesday, they post another article with a properly-cited image, but the image is licensed as CC BY-NC-SA. Disciplinary then investigates, concludes that both instances were honest but careless mistakes, and warns the user to pay closer attention to licensing rules.
- Example: The same user above posts an image with incorrect attribution a week later. Disciplinary investigates again and revokes the user's membership.
- Example: A user repeatedly posts articles incorporating text from other users' sandboxes, without attribution or permission. The second such instance within a month will be investigated by the Disciplinary team.
- Referral by Licensing, Administration, or AHT. Any member of those teams/groups may suggest that an instance of plagiarism be referred to Disciplinary. If there is agreement in the team/group, the case will be referred. This rules is intended for situations such as acting in bad faith or line-toeing.
- Example: Licensing staff believes that a user is attempting to game the above rule because they posted two unsourced images 32 days apart.
- Example: A user asks why the statue image was removed from SCP-173 and receives a correct answer. The next day, they post a tale about 173 containing the same image, with no attribution. Disciplinary investigates the user for trolling, and Administration asks the Disciplinary team to consider the plagiarism element as well.
- Example: Alice and Bob are collaborating on an article. They have a falling out. Bob posts the final version of the article, without credit to Alice, and makes a passive aggressive snipe at her in the author post. Alice contacts AHT and makes a complaint. AHT finds that while this was uncivil and malicious, it didn't rise to the level of harassment. AHT decides to refer the rule 0 violation and the plagiarism to Disciplinary.
- Any other circumstances defined by other rules, e.g. this proposal if it results in a new rule being passed and implemented.
If none of these conditions are met, the instance of plagiarism will be considered an issue in need of correction but will not be subject to the disciplinary process. (In other words, the problem will still need to be fixed but the user won't be "in trouble.") Similarly, if the user is a member of staff it will not be considered to rise to the level of "failure to uphold their duties as a member of staff" for purposes of the site charter unless one of the above conditions applies.
Irrespective of whether disciplinary action is taken, Licensing will retain authority over the correction of the plagiarism issue in question. (E.g. deletion of the page, editing to add a citation, removing a paragraph of offending content while keeping the remainder of the page, etc.) In particular, the Disciplinary team will not have special authority to remove or edit a page for licensing violations regardless of whether a case was referred to them.
DISCUSSION
This discussion is open to all members of staff, and will last for one week. (Noting that this was posted for a while before I added the timer and 04 link.)