"plagiarism".
I can certainly say that it was not intentional - nor was it deliberate. I
have great respect for the "EasyCFM" tutorials and either neglected to
properly quite an original author or the fell by the wayside with the
conversion to HTML for the actual tutorial.
Either way I do not look very professional for attempting to claim as my own
material tutorials of such a high calibre. Certainly this was never the
attempt as I believe sites like EasyCFM, Defusion.co, are very good for the
CF community.
I understand that attempts were made to contact me via email and I apologise
for cancelling the email account at about the same time - at that stage more
than 90% of my emails were - well, spam.
I have in the past endeavoured to spread the work for all sorts of web
development initiatives and not just ColdFusion (see www.actcfug.com) (over
100 links).
It was never a attempt to say that the great articles I forwarded were
"mine" but to put them out there. I did not do that very well and apologise
sincerely for that.
Kind Regards,
Peter Tilbrook
17 June 2004
________________________________
From: Guy Rish [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, 17 June 2004 4:10 PM
To: CF-Talk
Subject: RE: OT Plagiarism accusation stops posting
Michael,
While I haven't read the article/tutorials in question, I'm guessing that it
isn't a matter of plagiarizing the technical content. I'd bet that it is
most specifically that the verbiage is a match.
It would be difficult to write a tutorial for a general technique that did
not germinate from somewhere or someone else. This is most especially true
when the author, yourself in this case, is actively monitoring a community
resource such as this list. The real differentiator is how the material is
presented - which is likely very personal. The words that you might select
to convey to the reader an important point or the order of the steps
determined by how you want to emphasize something. In fact, one might say
that if you cannot see your personal mark stamped on it, then at least one
of two things might be true: the material is too simple and may not warrant
the writing effort or you need to buff your writing skills a bit.
I've written a number of published bits and I've asked myself those kinds of
questions each time. Certainly this *did not* make each article a perfect
piece of work but it did allow me to examine my work and try to improve the
next time around - though editors have a habit of skimming certain bits of
identity out of works, but that is a different discussion...
If you speak in your own voice I'm confident that you can avoid being
accused of plagiarism. You might consider revisiting your work and look at
it asking those kinds of things. If you can re-edit the work to better
satisfy them then you should *definitely* advance toward publishing it. The
community needs more writers.
Knowledge gets lost if it is not recorded. What "everyone knows" now may
one day have to be reasoned out again as the field changes and people move
onto other efforts. Unrecorded knowledge diminishes the community.
rish
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Kear [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2004 12:38 AM
To: CF-Talk
Subject: OT Plagiarism accusation stops posting
This fuss is the main reason I haven't posted up the tutorials I've written
for myself. As I've learned how to do many things I've kept them as
tutorials on my own intranet but I wont post them on the web, because
there's bound to be someone who says "That's mine!! I wrote that!. The
issue is, while I didn't invent the techniques in the tutorials, I certainly
wrote the tutorials, but the language and style is similar to others I've
seen. And some of the text will be out of the emails here on CF-TALK, where
I've learned how to do the thing in the tutorial.
I understand about copyright and intellectual property - I spend a lot of my
off-work time working with musicians and record labels in that field. But
also the fear of being accused of plagiarism in my case is keeping me from
sticking my head up and saying "I'll share what I know".
The origins of some of the stuff I have is so mixed up now I'll never be
able to say "that bit's from him, and that bits from him".
Cheers
Mike Kear
Windsor, NSW, Australia
AFP Webworks
http://afpwebworks.com
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