76

Consider this question:

HashSet removeAll method is surprisingly slow

It was posted in 2015. It has a fair number of upvotes, a handful of favorites, and one accepted answer with a pretty good number of upvotes. It's a reasonable question that exposes an interesting technical issue, and the answer is accurate and relevant.

The issue is that the question was quite clearly copied almost directly from an old article by Jon Skeet:

https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2010/07/29/there-s-a-hole-in-my-abstraction-dear-liza-dear-liza/

This article is dated 2010. To cross-check this, I dug up the article in its old location from the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100922151103/http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon_skeet/archive/2010/07/29/there-s-a-hole-in-my-abstraction-dear-liza-dear-liza.aspx

If you look at Skeet's article, it's pretty easy to see that much of the text of the question is directly copied (with light editing), the code is the same, and the results are the same, even down to one of the timing results of 178131ms!

What's weird is that Skeet's article includes an explanation, a quotation from the specification, and some discussion, that's not included in the question. I'm not sure what would motivate someone to do this. (The SO answer includes the same quotation from the specification, but it also cites some code, and it has different discussion. It's not plagiarized.)

What, if anything, should be done about this?

5
  • 12
    That's a culture collision, plagiarism doesn't nearly have the same stigma in the OP's neck of the woods as it does in the west. Not just limited to plagiarism either. We can't teach a billion people new mores at meta, might take another hundred+ years. Meanwhile we can edit their posts. – Hans Passant May 3 '19 at 22:41
  • Posting the same questions mare pretty sense. But only if you are not directly interested in the answer. Maybe the questioner would know is other people exposed to the same question would be come to the same conclusion. So the actual question might be what would the people on stack overflow conclude. – Lee May 6 '19 at 10:08
  • Well, I don't know if people started down voting the question more, but I think we should not do it because... it's like voting on the user and not the post. Even if the resource is available on the internet, it doesn't make the question less useful. A "simple" dissociation would be enough. – user202729 May 6 '19 at 11:50
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    Do we have a meta dupe about Bug report and plagiat? For people using Bugzilla, JDK bug report to carft question? – xdtTransform May 6 '19 at 12:34
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    It seems to me quite bold to plagiarize Jon Skeet on Stack Overflow, of all places. It's even more surprising that despite the poor choice of venue for doing that plagiarism, it actually still avoided detection for so many years. – WBT May 6 '19 at 16:51
75

Plagiarism is plagiarism. It should be handled in this case as it should be for any case: a private flag on the post for moderator attention, presenting the evidence that you have (including a link to the original source), and letting us figure out how to deal with it.

Since this is already public, I'll noodle a bit on how I'd handle it.

First, confirmed that your "flag" is correct. The question is definitely plagiarized. Also, "wow" is my reaction.

The thought occurs to me that this would be a much more difficult case if the author had copied the first half of the question from Jon's blog, but done the timing tests himself, resulting in a case of partial plagiarism. In that case, I'd probably edit in attribution to Jon's blog, but leave the question otherwise alone. I'm not sure, though; it would depend on how blatant the abuse was. Fortunately, I don't have to deal with that here. The entire thing is shamelessly plagiarized. Completely unacceptable; not something that should be handled lightly.

Normally, we delete plagiarized content, which not only removes it from the site to address the ethical issues, but also removes the reputation gain from the user who posted it. In this case, though, deletion is severely counter-indicated by the usefulness of the question, and especially the answers that it has accumulated.

But plagiarism is still wrong, and needs to be addressed. So…what to do? Here's what I 'd do am doing:

  1. Edit the question to add in the appropriate attribution, giving credit to Jon as the original source of the question.

  2. Ask for a Community Manager (Stack Exchange employee) to dissociate the question from the original asker's account, thus removing the ill-gotten reputation gain from plagiarized content.

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    The question/answer are over 60 days old and score more than 3, so wouldn't the rep be kept if it was deleted? (As per the FAQ). – Laurel May 3 '19 at 18:04
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    Yes, @Laurel, that's correct. In such cases, we still ask for dissociation, even if the post is deleted. – Cody Gray May 3 '19 at 18:04
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    I think it is sufficiently clear. This isn't designed as a how-to guide for new moderators, but rather an insight for general community members on how we handle plagiarized content. – Cody Gray May 3 '19 at 18:05
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    It doesn't really matter how useful the copied content is, SO doesn't have the right to host the content at all, since the person who posted it didn't have the right to apply the CC-wiki license to it. – Servy May 3 '19 at 18:11
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    Right, that's why attribution and proper use of blockquote formatting is so important. It makes clear what portions of the content are the original authors, and thus licensed under CC by-SA, and which portions are the property of someone else. Moderators don't enforce legal issues; if Jon (or anyone else) wants to issue a takedown notice, they can do that here or though other channels. – Cody Gray May 3 '19 at 18:13
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    Dissociation breaks the connection between the user and the post, unlike deletion. So, yes, it removes all rep gained, regardless of the age of the post. @psubsee2003 – Cody Gray May 3 '19 at 18:26
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    Has anyone verified that the original license for the document is compatible with cc-by-sa? I haven't been able to find a license attached to the original content, so it appears to be all rights reserved. – user4639281 May 3 '19 at 19:18
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    No, @Tiny, we don't do that. We're not lawyers; we don't judge license violations. See my previous comment. Plagiarism is a different issue altogether. – Cody Gray May 3 '19 at 19:21
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    I'm not a fan of how often the community uses the "we're not lawyers" excuse in cases where the law is simple and unambiguous. We're not Stack Exchange Inc; there's no legal liability if we chose to do the easy thing and follow the law rather than throwing up our hands. – Jeremy May 3 '19 at 19:44
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    @Jeremy I agree, but have a different view on “the easy thing”. My view of the easy thing is to make the content available in good faith, with clear and unambiguous attribution to the original source. I believe that this is consistent with the doctrine of fair use, but with the obvious excuse that we’re not lawyers and do not enforce copyright law. In other words, I prefer to err on the side of making useful content available in an appropriate form, as opposed to being an agent of DMCA censorship. – Cody Gray May 3 '19 at 19:47
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    Are admins able to switch the author of the answer? Skeet has an account fortunately, it's just a matter of transferring the ownership. – Knu May 4 '19 at 22:32
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    @Knu Even if they are, using that power wouldn't make sense here. I'm not sure if you really meant switching the author of the answer (given it's the question that was plagiarised), but it'd be wrong either way; Jon Skeet did not write the question or the answer, and so any attribution of it to him would be false. In the case of the question, it'd also make Skeet look demented (why is he asking the community to explain to him something he explained clearly in his own blog post?) and in the case of the answer, it'd unfairly strip credit for the answer from its entirely innocent author. – Mark Amery May 5 '19 at 14:02
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    wonder if this user plagiarized some of their other posts. I don't have time nor desire to check all of their 190+ questions but sampling few of them suggests that it can be the case indeed. For example I think this one very heavily borrows from JDK-8193860 and this one from JDK-8062801 and there is no attribution – gnat May 6 '19 at 9:04
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    Would an option be to make the question a community wiki? That way the user doesn't recieve any reputation from the post, but will still have it attributed to them? – angussidney May 6 '19 at 10:05
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    Have any of you stopped to ask Jon Skeet what to do? He's the original author anyways. – Braiam May 6 '19 at 10:33
19

Here are some ideas about what I think should and shouldn't be done.

  • I don't think the question should be removed, because it's a valuable and relevant issue. (I work in this area, and somebody pointed me to it.) Others might run across the same issue. On a purely technical level, it's valuable to have on the site.

  • The answer is useful and is original work, so the answerer shouldn't be penalized.

  • A link should be added to point to Skeet's article to indicate its original authorship.

  • I'm not really keen on punishment, but it seems wrong for the poster to benefit from this. Perhaps the question-upvote points should be docked from the poster. Maybe they should be awarded to Jon Skeet, though it's unclear whether he needs any more points. :-)

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    google.com/… Maybe you can ask Google also to show the original blog instead of the question! – Nidhin David May 5 '19 at 16:43
-3

There is another problem at work here than just "plagiarizing"

The content on the blog is copyrighted. When no license is mentioned it's all rights reserved. This means this question breaches Jon Skeet's copyright and should be taken down and removed from Stack Overflows servers if no permission is obtained from the original author to re-post it under CC-BY-SA.

And there is no copyright license mentioned on that blog, which makes this an unauthorized copy.

The current favored solution seems to be paste in a link to the blog and all is right as rain. That would only work if it follows all the proper citation rules:

1) it needs to be an insignificant part of the whole,
2) properly attributed,
3) distinct from the rest of the text.

2 and 3 are met, 1 isn't. This means that it violates copyright and should be removed, deleted without a trace unless permission is obtained from the author.

7
  • How is this "separate" from a plagiarism problem? – yivi May 6 '19 at 12:01
  • @yivi see my edited answer – Tschallacka May 6 '19 at 12:04
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    People seem to disagree with basic copyright law. Arr ye pirates! – Tschallacka May 6 '19 at 12:06
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    Note, that SE should not act until a DMCA is retrieved. Otherwise, it becomes liable to expectations that they actively pursue copyright violators. – Braiam May 6 '19 at 13:45
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    @Braiam They could remove it under a violation of the ToS, which tells the user to check if they have the right to reshare it under CC-BY-SA, keeping copyright out of the equation, formally, and reduce it to a ToS violation. – Tschallacka May 6 '19 at 14:04
  • At present, the question has the content quoted, with proper citation. There is absolutely nothing wrong with quoting content, anywhere. The only issue with quoting content is possible misrepresentation, which is not the case here. There is no violation of copyright. – Travis J May 6 '19 at 18:15
  • @TravisJ wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/summary_berne.html so in US it would be ok, but basically, the rest of the world says, no, doesn't fit, violates copyright law. – Tschallacka May 6 '19 at 19:10

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