Do we want copy-paste answers?

Question

How should we as a site deal with answers which are nothing but merely a copy paste from another article or site?

It's is no on islam.se, so I was wondering, what's the status of such post here?

Answer 1

The first rule is that you should quote and attribute any direct quotations. There may also be limits on what size of quotation represents fair use. These two issues are important from an ethical and legal perspective. Attribution is also useful to the reader.

Then there is the perspective of what makes a good answer. In general, the voting mechanism sorts out whether an answer is appreciated, although there are limits (e.g., spam, comment answers, not an answer at all, etc.).

That said my general advice on incorporating quotes would be:

• Put the quote in a quotation block
• Attribute the quote with a reference, preferably also with a working url
• Relate the quote to the question
• If needed, bold aspects of the quote to highlight elements that directly answer the question and edit the quote to make the key points clearer (e.g., put three periods "..." to indicate omissions or use brackets "[]" to make the quote make sense).

Answer 2

No, we don't want copy-and-paste answers, especially if they are links to wikipedia. If your answer is just a copy-and-paste of wikipedia or the abstract of an article then just give that link as a comment, not as an answer.

Copy-and-pastes are almost never good answers (with the exception of asking what some historical figure thought on something, or a formal definition). They are usually a lazy way for people to provide answers without tailoring them to the exact question that was asked, or even bothering to understand the source they are quoting. In almost all cases, it is preferable to summarize the source (as long as your do it faithfully, an attribute) and tailor the answer to the specific question instead of just quoting a single person.

In the cognitive sciences, it is also easy to get source on either side of a question, so a good answers involves multiple sources and a synthesis of several references.

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Here are two related discussions:

• Advice on how to write and research a good scientific answer

• How do I ask a good question?

Answer 3

As @JeromyAnglim pointed out, a case that's literally of the sort you've described poses legal problems. I assume Meta Stack Overflow has its own policy about plagiarism, and I hope the moderators here know it and know (better than I would) what to do if they see plagiarism. As for users like me, I'd say it's sort of a matter of personal discretion whether to comment to notify the answer's "author" of one's concern, or whether to just flag it right away for moderator attention (and explain, of course). If one comments but doesn't flag, I'd say there's a little added responsibility to check back and see if anything gets done about it later, but it's the same sort of voluntary responsibility we all have for participating in the site: someone else can do it, but some amount of social loafing is likely, so anyone who notices the problem should try to take responsibility. If the plagiarist doesn't take responsibility, a moderator (or maybe the Stack Exchange lawyers) will ultimately have to deal with it one way or another (unless no one ever cares to sue, which is likely enough in most cases after all, I suppose), but anyone who notices plagiarism should either help the moderators take over right away by flagging, or should check back after commenting and flag it after the plagiarist has had a reasonable amount of time to (not) attribute the source. If someone else had already commented a while ago about plagiarism before I got there, and nothing had been done to fix it since, I'd probably just flag it right away, and maybe downvote too.

Since attribution is necessary, I would also discourage upvoting any answers that are clearly plagiarized, and hesitating to upvote when there's suspicion. Once attribution is in place, it becomes another question entirely. I have no objections to answering entirely with properly attributed quotes if this is the best option, but of course there are times when paraphrasing, summarizing, etc. would be preferable. Problems like that might be solved by commenting or editing, and shouldn't necessitate moderators IMO.

In my experience as a psychology teacher, I've noticed that plagiarism is a big problem in my field. As I said before, I'm sure Meta Stack Overflow has its policy in general, but I'm glad this question came up here separately, as we may need to have our own nuanced policy as well to handle a higher volume of cases in the long run. In my experience, a lot of plagiarism occurs due to mere ignorance of the governing rules (some of which are laws and have teeth), and can be sorted out easily by explaining the rule (or directing the plagiarist to a resource that explains it, which might be useful if someone could recommend a good one in this thread!), and bugging the person to follow it. Some willful plagiarism occurs knowingly for reasons with which I might sympathize, so sometimes I might prefer to see an answer deleted than referred for prosecution...but given the legal risk (for Stack Exchange too), I'd say every instance should be taken seriously and remedied sooner rather than later, by a moderator if not the author.

BTW, I can't quite decide how I feel about inserting the source myself if I happen to know it or can find it, instead of telling the plagiarist to do so. On one hand, it solves the immediately obvious problem, reduces the motivation for a lawsuit, and probably makes a lawsuit very unlikely to succeed; on the other, the evidence of the crime is still there in the edit history, and the person's behavioral pattern (to whatever extent it can be inferred from the case(s) at hand) hasn't been addressed. I'd appreciate any comments on this sub-issue, if it's worth considering.

Answer 4

Ultimately, I believe it ought to be a balance between quoting (with attribution), paraphrasing and summarising... preferably with a diagram or two and a TL:DR if it is a lengthy answer.

I am not impressed by "wall of text" replies and generally don't upvote them (nor do I necessarily downvote them).