Dear Shrinivasan, Preemptive apology - sorry to jump on the bandwagon, but my 2 paise follow :)
On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 3:19 PM, Shrinivasan T <[email protected]>wrote: > The real issue is I still can not understand this things. > > If I know somw event is happening about any Free Open Source Software, > I just share the information here. > > I do not get them as forward mail. > I get the information from various sites, mailing lists, irc etc. > After some editing like adding links, formatting, I share it to the > mailing list. > > It's as simple as this - if it's not content you came up with, use quotes (or anything that indicates that you've copied it from elsewhere, or are quoting someone). If possible, attribute. If you're unable to use quotes (for whatever reason), paraphrase. It's considered bad manners and (worse still) plagiarism to not indicate the portions you've borrowed from someone else. Moreover, just adding one line, link, comment, or any minor changes, do not justify using content as your own. And, I can't say it enough - attribute, attribute, attribute. For instance: You may be mashing up an announcement and have used a few lines from some event announcement on a developer list, a few lines from someone's blog post, and a couple of lines from a website. You may put your announcement together, but the content is still not yours - it's from 3 different places. Ideally, you should put them individually in quotes with corresponding attributions. eg. ----- ABC has a sprint happening at <venue> on <date>. <xyz_name> on the <blah_name> mailing list says the following about this. "<whatever you want to quote from xyz's email>" As <MN>, the author of <insert> package, says in her blog, <quote> insert snippet from blog </quote>. For more information on this wonderful package refer <website>. ----- > I dont want to give just a single url and all to click to explore what it > is, > I give as much information as possible in the mail itself. > > Links are also being provided for further exploration. > > Those event information and content are to share with others and they > dont request for any attribution. > Understood. I do remember sending you a bio/write up offlist for some talk and saw it sent verbatim to the list without quotes or attribution. While there was no attribution required, it was not content that you generated but it certainly looked like you did (likely unintentionally). Quotations to indicate that you didn't write the lines would be a graceful way of helping others realize who came up with what or at least in distinguishing between something authored by you and someone else. While I was not miffed, I do think it's not good practice to not quote, especially in open source circles and academia. Basically, while attribution is upto you, copying is not, i.e., 'tis not a sin to not attribute, but it's a serious one to not quote content that you did not come up with. Thumbrule - if you have pasted a line from somewhere, put it in quotes, and attribute the author (if content snipped is significant). If it's someone else's idea or if rephrasing it, mention that you're paraphrasing someone else. This applies almost everywhere - college projects, assignments, homework, writing research papers, articles, publishing *anything* anywhere ... You don't want to be stuck with a "plagiarism" tag! A better (and more objective/impersonal) explanation can be found under "Notes on plagiarism" at - http://www.aero.iitb.ac.in/home/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=17&Itemid=25 HTH :) Cheers, KD -- Webpage - http://kadambarid.in Weblog - http://kadambarid.livejournal.com _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
