Get to know more about Plagiarism

Introduction

Hive is a social media and blogging platform based on the hive Blockchain. As regards to blogging, this invloves publishing a lot of documents (images, videos, write-ups, etc) by a the users on the platform, which are a large number of people. One has to come up with something unique and be careful to not copy other people's work or not giving enough honor to whom it is due, in what can be referred to as plagiarism.

So what is plagiarism? To me, its simply copying someone else's contents ( images, videos, write-ups etc) and publishing it as your own with little to no reference to the original creator/author.

Now lets see a popular definitions of plagiarism;

Copying of another person's ideas, text or other creative work, and presenting it as one's own, especially without permission; plagiarizing.
Dictionary definition.

Forms of plagiarism

Plagiarism is not just in a single form, this is what makes it a tricky subject. To the best of my knowledge, there are generally 3 forms of plagiarism;

Copy and Paste
This can be referred to as verbatim, where one just lazily copies a work from another source and pastes the work in his or her own work. This can be the whole document copied or just a part of it, either way, we are saying the same thing.
Paraphrasing
This is the act of taking up an article, and changing the words of the article without necessarily changing the meaning of the article, in other words, both statements (original and paraphrased) says the same thing. The paraphrased work depends totally on the original.
Improper Citation
This can be looked at as not giving proper honor to whom it is due. There are some people who recognize that some part of their published work are not theirs and they try to acknowledge the original creators, but they seem not to do it right or just do it rudely, and/or doesn't make it visible enough. There are so many ways to site a work which is not yours and it's up to the author to properly site them otherwise risk being tagged a plagiarist.

Stoping Plagiarism

Source

Plagiarism is not something that can't be avoided or even stopped totally, there a some ways through which it can be stopped, or at least reduced significantly. Here a some ways to stop plagiarism

Educate
As popular as this word may be, many don't know about it, or at least don't know what it entails. Finding a way to pass across the concept of plagiarism and it risks and rewards for originality, will go a long way to help shun plagiarism. Also encouraging people to get proper understanding of the work they wish to publish will help as people mostly plagiarize what they find hard to understand.
Encourage
Not all people plagiarize, but some of those who devote time and effort into something unique go unnoticed. This can kill morale of anyone, really. After putting in long hours of work and then publish only to not get any sort of recognition or reward, why not plagiarized? Since not all plagiarized works are punished.

Rewarding original works is a good way to overcome plagiarism and Steemit here is doing just that and its so encouraging.

Punish
Even after all these there will still be violators, punish them. This does two things; firstly, it discourages plagirists as no one likes to be punished and secondly it gives some sort of hope to the originalists, they can be sure that those lazy folks are punished, otherwise, why the hardwork?. The punishment should not be an easy one so as to really discourage plagiarism.

Thanks for reading through.