DEV Community

DEV Community: How to Avoid Plagiarism

Casey 💎 on May 05, 2021

This post was updated by the DEV Team on January 5th 2023 to take into account AI-assisted plagiarism. As DEV continues to grow, we want to ensure...

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Temani Afif • May 5 '21 • Edited

Let's hope this post will also play as a warning for people doing plagiarism 😉

A good free tool I always use to detect plagiarism is ... Google! yes google. If you have any doubt about any content, take 3 or 4 sentences for the post (always from the middle, not from the beginning) and put them on the search result. If it's a plagiarism you will get the original post.

Another advice is to consider formatting. Bad formatted posts are generally plagiarism due to the simple copy/past (yes, some users are lazy to format what they pick elsewhere)

Atulit Anand • May 6 '21

That's actually clever

Michael Tharrington • May 6 '21

Thanks so much for writing this up Casey, this is super helpful advice all around! I really like how you covered the plagiarism that is specific to the developer world — folks copying code without giving credit or misrepresenting repos at their own.

So happy to be working with ya to remove plagiarism from the site and educate folks on how to properly cite sources!

Akin C. • May 6 '21

Hello Casey 💎,

thanks for your article!
I assume the diamond is part of your name so I put it in there :D!
Showing respect for someone's work is always important because at least two simple reasons came to my mind (besides the reason that the work is not one's own).

This person's work seems to be "teaching" and therefore has some value to you if used
That person's work was done with difficulty, and if the person is not named, the effort will not be respected

However, there may be licenses or other situations where the work can be used by someone else without naming. Therefore, I fully agree with
"If you encounter plagiarism, the absolute BEST action you can take is to report the post. Reporting the post sends it directly to our community team to take action."

Please consider some research before blocking the content. Otherwise, it could lead to great displeasure. Take, as an example, an extreme situation where a group of people does not report real plagiarism just to create such unrest within the community.

But keep in mind that I am not an expert on such critical situations. These are just some thoughts.

Casey 💎 • May 6 '21

Hey Akin!

I completely agree with you! There's definitely a gray area that may be unknown to an average user. We're always looking into reports and also reaching out to the original authors in some instances.

Please consider some research before blocking the content.

You betcha! All reports are reviewed by the Community Success team, Michael, Ella, and myself before any action is taken. We're also very forgiving in most instances because a lot of times it's not malicious

Matt Ellen-Tsivintzeli • May 12 '21 • Edited

What I find odd, as some plagiarised posts are easy to spot from their title alone*, is that the things being plagiarised often exist on multiple pages on the web, which raises the question: are the plagiarisers plagiarising other plagiarisers?

* Titles like "unions with c" or "c strings" or other such short titles, always about C.

Gracie Gregory (she/her) • May 6 '21

This is awesome. Thanks to the entire Community Success team for the work you do protecting people and their work.

CraigRoss • May 7 '21

Anyone know how do we stop people stealing our front end code in chrome extensions now that Google are discontinuing the licensing api (which normally protects front end code for paid for chrome extensions)? 9to5google.com/2020/09/22/google-c...