On 27 May 2026, at 2:53, Stephen Farrell wrote:
> Hiya, > > On 27/05/2026 02:43, Brian E Carpenter wrote: >> While I feel sure we need to say "no plagiarism", > > Is that actually well-defined for I-Ds? We have a tradition > that someone can pick up the ball and run with it, whenever > something needs revising. That mostly involves earlier text > authors being involved but not always. Similarly, we often > copy chunks of text from document A to document B without > asking the authors of A. Those are almost never problematic > with our boilerplate (and are almost always done well), but > I dunno if there's a definition of plagiarism that fits what > we want. Every definition of plagiarism I can find talks about misrepresenting another person’s work as your own. I don’t see plagiarism concerns in our processes, provided appropriate credit is given. The way we phrased this for the IRTF, in RFC 9775, was: > Plagiarism, misrepresentation of authorship, and content > falsification constitute dishonesty and fraud. Such actions > are prohibited and the IRTF may take action against authors > who commit them, including… and > The IRTF publishes informational and experimental documents > in the RFC series. The nature of these documents, and their > preceding Internet-Drafts, is that they often extend or > elaborate upon previously published research results, to > support ongoing development and experimentation by the IRTF > community. These documents are encouraged as an important > part of the process of disseminating research ideas and > ensuring that they work in the Internet at large. Authors > must ensure that prior work, including their own prior work, > is appropriately cited and acknowledged, and that new documents > respect the copyright of prior work and are written with the > permission of any coauthors. > > IRTF documents may represent the views of their authors or > they may be consensus documents representing the views of a > research group. It is a misrepresentation for authors to > falsely claim that a document represents the consensus view > of a research group. Similarly, the editors of a research > group consensus document must not misrepresent their role > as that of authors. This text won’t directly work for the IETF, but something similar could be suitable. Colin -- rswg mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
