Plagiarists on Medium, Fyi.
Also, accidental plagiarism and temper tantrums.
I’m here to talk about a dirty secret that’s only ever whispered about and breathes in the dark corners of Medium. Whispered by editors and defended by the perpetrators. We need to shine a light on it.
There are plagiarists on Medium.
Why? Why do people plagiarize?
Simple.
Cha-chang.
To a person with wobbly morals, Medium looks like a gold mine. Grab content from the internet, post it behind the paywall — and cash out.
You need to know this happens.
They’re not writers, those people. Not the way you and I are.
They never stare at the blank screen wondering what to write. Never bleed onto the page, wondering if it’s too raw. They never hit publish and pray someone will read their words and resonate.
No. They just steal and hope to get paid.
What a gig, eh?
A few things that are important to know…
1. Intentional plagiarists are the minority…
Most writers are honest. We know better. We wouldn’t steal someone else’s words. Horrified at the very thought.
We know what it’s like to come to the page every day to try to write something honest and fresh that someone might want to read. To hit that publish button and hope. Please God, let someone like this.
We don’t write for ourselves. It starts there, yes. But once we push the button, we all hope to touch someone.
Not all writers are good.
No. That’s evident. We don’t talk about that very much, either. But honest and good aren’t the same thing. For now, we’re talking about honest.
There are people who do not bring honesty to the table. Intentional plagiarists. They know what they’re doing.
Technically, it’s called “global” plagiarism. Global means “the whole thing” — they stole the whole darn article and slapped their name on it.
And the people who do that? They are among us.
Be very clear that “those”plagiarists are the minority.
I’ve been an editor at Illumination for 3 weeks. In 3 weeks, our editors have found, reported and shut down 3 plagiarists. One per week.
Every week, we publish thousands of writers and stories. Around the clock. Plagiarized submissions are less than 1%.
But they’re here.
Each time, the plagiarist has been reported to Medium — and shut down. Because luck of the draw, they got an editor that pays for grammarly. Out of their own pocket.
And so the plagiarists get found, reported and shut down.
I have never been so proud to be counted among a group of people as I am with the Illumination editorial group. Good, hard-working people that do their best, every day, to look after our writers.
Note to plagiarists: Do not bring that to Illumination. We will find you. We will end you. Illumination is not a safe place to bring that game.
2. Plagiarism is a violation of Medium terms.
Plagiarism is not a crime in America. Can you even believe that? It can form the basis of a copyright infringement claim, but itself — it’s not a crime.
That alone makes me mad.
But regardless of the laws are where you live, plagiarism is a violation of Medium’s terms.
On a writing site, it has to be.
Here’s what Medium says about it…
Medium defines plagiarism as any act of taking the words and/or ideas of others and presenting them as original or without proper acknowledgement or permission.
Detected instances of plagiarism on Medium may result in suspension of posts or accounts, and having Partner Program payments withheld. [read more]
If it’s happening on Illumination, it’s happening on other publications, too. That’s a promise. Just because few (if any) put it in the submission terms, all publications and writers are bound by Medium’s terms.
3. Accidental plagiarism happens, too. A lot.
Plagiarism isn’t just when someone grabs an entire article you wrote and claims it as their own. That’s outright and intentional, of course.
But accidental plagiarism happens, too.
Usually, it happens when a writer is hurrying to meet some quota they’ve invented in their head, so they grab bits and pieces of articles from the internet to cobble together an article.
Here’s what Medium says about it…
This includes directly copying ideas and text (whether entire articles, paragraphs, or sentences), as well as paraphrasing and slight re-writes (often known as “mosaic plagiarism”), and failure to cite sources.
Detected instances of plagiarism on Medium may result in suspension of posts or accounts, and having Partner Program payments withheld. [read more]
The name assigned depends on whether you took one chunk of text or many.
— Verbatim plagiarism is directly copying a passage of text without citation.
— Mosaic plagiarism is combining from multiple sources without citation.
Firstly — grabbing a bunch of paragraphs from other sites and cobbling them together is not writing.
Secondly — cite your sources, people! That’s why Medium suggests it in the writer’s guide and curation guide.
Temper tantrums?
Imagine this, okay? A writer has a blog. The blog is called The Naked Pen. The writer uses a different name on Medium. Then that writer begins copying his blog posts over to Medium, and editing them a bit to improve them.
So an editor opens the submission. And it says 25% unique content, 75% from The Naked Pen.
Can you see where this might go? How it might get ugly, real quick?
And honestly? If it was any other publication, it might go nowhere. Even if it wasn’t “you” sharing your own content. Even if it was being stolen from you.
So when an editor reaches out to ask, don’t lose your nut instantly.
For starters, you could help editors publish faster with one little line at the bottom. Originally published on my blog, The Naked Pen.
See how that works? How easy?
Not all editors on Medium care about plagiarism
When you’re facing hundreds or thousands of submissions all day, every day, it’s a lot of work. Hard enough to deal with the stupid errors that happen all the time. Forgotten image credits and other stupid mistakes.
At Illumination, we try to go the extra mile. As the saying goes, there’s not much competition on the extra mile. That’s how we’ve reached 25K readers in 5 months.
We don’t just find outright plagiarists. We also see the accidental plagiarists. That’s why we sometimes say please cite your sources.
It’s why we sometimes reject a piece. 90% content that’s grabbed from another site isn’t writing. We’d rather have bad writing than that. Bad writing you can at least learn from.
It’s worth thinking about.
“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters” — Albert Einstein