http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=576785


in reply to How should Perlmonks deal with Plagiarism?

liverpole, it might be worse than you think. I started uncovering a few of these myself. Not only did someone lift a question from elsewhere, someone else lifted the answer from the same site!

I started noticing a pattern, it seems that one account was routinely used to post decent questions (albeit lifted from their rightful owners) while another account was used to post correct answers. <conspiracy-mode>As if XP were so important to someone that they created a new account to boost the XP of their original account.</conspiracy-mode>

This is really ridiculous. You're right, it is disrespectful. It is demeaning. It is frustrating. It does lower the standards.

jcoxen's solution seems pretty fair. Assuming that doesn't happen (as suggested in the CB, it may well not), we just need to be on the lookout for their posts and do a little research before approving. If at all.

For sake of completeness, and perhaps to save you some more work, I stumbled across these:

It's obvious we've got to do something, as the original posts from those users I haven't commented on have already been spotted by others.



--chargrill 
s**lil*;  $*=join'',sort split q**;  s;.*;grr; &&s+(.(.)).+$2$1+; $; =
qq-$_-;s,.*,ahc,;$,.=chop for split q,,,reverse;print for($,,$;,$*,$/)

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Re^2: How should Perlmonks deal with Plagiarism?
by liverpole (Monsignor) on Oct 07, 2006 at 15:28 UTC
    ++chargrill,

    For your excellent sleuthing skills!  I'll be honest, it hadn't yet occurred to me that this was such a concerted effort by these [id://jesuashok|two] [id://madtoperl|characters].  But now it's making a lot more sense.

    Grandfather, they may or may not be the same person.  There's a fair amount of evidence I've seen to actually suggest they are separate individuals, named "Anthony Jesu Ashok and "Regan P." (although either or both could be pseudonyms), and both from Chennai, India.  But whether they are the same, or just working together, they are committing fraud, and flouting the rules of Perlmonks.  I, for one, won't ever be approving anything either of them write, at least in the absence of some act of contrition.

    Furthermore, I'm in complete agreement with creamygoodness later in this thread:  I'm ++ voting anyone that correctly identifies any case of plagiarism (as well as -- voting the OP).

    Now if you'll excuse me, there's a number of chargrill's nodes I need to ++ ...

    s''(q.S:$/9=(T1';s;(..)(..);$..=substr+crypt($1,$2),2,3;eg;print$..$/
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      If you tell the PM-terruhrists what methods you are going to use to smoke them out, then they will know what to prepare for to beat you!

      What's to stop a clever plagiarist from doing this:

      1) set up fake accounts, scrape for and then repost questions with high XP, and then from other fake accounts, scrape the answers and reposts them

      2) then from the account they actually want to accumulate high XP, send you and your cohorts a message pointing out the the obviously plagiarized posts

      3) XP PROFIT!

      But in all seriousness, perhaps any new posts should be scanned for similarity to previous posts. I recall a few months back seeing a snippet or a meditation about a writing a text plagiarism detection module, I think it was by Ovid?

      You could also add something to the XP scoring so that posts more similar to other posts don't get as much XP. And then also take into account the number of replies, and the similarity compared to all of those replies. Genuinely interesting posts tend to have many unique replies.

      Ultimately I think this is an unintended consequence of the recent XP scale changes. One might think it's a huge disincentive to cheaters and participants to make a saint require 10,000 XP and then adding a whole heirarchy of levels higher than saint with XP levels that are impossible to attain. But perhaps the opposite occured--since high XP is now such an impossible attainment, it became valuable enough to cheat for!
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Re^2: How should Perlmonks deal with Plagiarism?
by GrandFather (Saint) on Oct 07, 2006 at 03:17 UTC

    Are they different people?

    DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel
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