There is lots and lots of plagiarism on the Steem blockchain. Recently, I’ve started hunting plagiarisers because it feels nice and rewarding to do something good, in this case catching plagiarisers. Also, you get a small reward if you report it to Steemcleaners. I’m not very good at finding plagiarisers myself, but I thought I’d share a few of my methods to finding if a post is plagiarised.
Obvious plagiarism?
If I suspect a post contains plagiarism, the first thing I usually do is run it through an online plagiarism checker, such as smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker. These kinds of tools only find the most obvious plagiarism, so you will also want to try other methods, like manually searching on Google.
Don’t give up!
If the plagiarism finder can’t find anything, but I’m still suspicious, I try to Google a few lines from the post in quotation marks. By putting quotation marks around a sentence when Googling, it will look for exactly what you entered. This way, you'll more likely find what you're looking for compared to not using quotation marks.
Some are even lazier...
In some cases, I've also found the original post by reverse searching the image. You can do this by right-clicking on the image and selecting "Search Google for Image".
This will bring you to Google and if it can find any matching pages with that picture, you will see "Pages that include matching images" if you scroll down. I've seen a bunch plagiarisers who don't bother looking for another picture because they probably believe if they slightly reword the text, nobody will notice. Some don't know you can do a reverse image search.
“Google is your friend”
Another trick I've seen people use is translate a post in their own language to English (oftentimes using Google Translate), so if you know their native language (perhaps they've got a few posts in it) you can translate the post to it and check for plagiarism with the translated text. I recently came across a plagiariser that had both Bahasa and English posts and the Bahasa posts had been plagiarised and translated from English, while the English posts had been plagiarised and translated from Bahasa.
Hmm….
When someone joins the TWB discord we’re obviously curious to see their posts. A few times in the recent weeks there have been some suspicious people joining. But what made us suspicious? We compared their English when chatting to their posts and saw that they were very different.
Conclusion
If someone were to take something I’ve written and make money off of it, I would be very mad. Plagiarisers put in almost no effort in plagiarising and some even earn a bit from it. I would say that’s not far away from stealing from someone’s wallet.
Since Steem is a decentralized platform, I think everybody should look out and report plagiarism if they come across it. It’s a way to give back to the community.
If you’ve got any other tips on finding plagiarism, please let me know!
Muxxybot appreciates your sleuthing skills ....*....Hahaha, thanks a lot muxxybot!
Good post, Detective Surfie. Much power to your elbow, Sir!
Haven't heard that expression before. Thank you!
Great write-up, Surf! Very well done.
Thank you, Tiny!
Thanks for sharing your process on how to find and report plagiarists! Hopefully others will join you in your cause :)
I really hope so. There is way too much plagiarism on Steem currently. Hopefully a few people learn from this and report plagiarism :)
This is outstanding. And what do you mean, "not very good at finding plagiarizers yourself?" You're one of the best I've ever seen at it! And you are a real blessing to us on the Block. I hope this post gets some very hefty upvotes to reward you for the effort you're putting into this community.
Getting "surfed" is bound to become a catchphrase on the blockchain just like getting "busted." LOL
LOL, that'd be funny. And I never knew I was that good, thank you! I'm so happy to be a part of TWB.
hmmm i can see "You've been Surf'd" banner coming to put on your victims... err the culprits post
Proud to have you part of our team on the Block, Surf! Good job on the article.
And I'm happy to be there. Thank you!
Keep up the good work surfie! This isnt just close to stealing from your wallet, this is stealing from your mind. Protect our minds surfie!
Thank you! And wow, you're right... that thought never crossed my mind.
Excellent work, Sherlock. Good show, old man.
Thanks a lot, kid ;)
Thank you for writing about this serious problem in the Steemit community. I didn't know about the plagiarism tracker tool and have always searched through Google. I have also started reporting those I've investigated to steemcleaners. Hope more people help in cleaning our platform. Btw, found this through Pimp My Post Thursday in discord :)
No problem, great that you learned something!
The PYPT thing came as a surprise... I didn't know Rhonda would do it for me :o
Your post deserve to be shared and I'm glad Rhonda did :)
This is excellent information, @surfknasen. Is it pinned at The Writers' Block?
Thank you! I don't think it is pinned.
good job i feel you on this , lets help the community and filter this stuff out, good tips to help thanks @surfknasen
Thank you!
Since curating for the @minnowsupport project in the tech niche I see this all the time. Been using Google to search for sentences and often find they are just a straight copy and paste. Did not know about that plagiarism tool. Thanks for the tips!
No problem! I'm glad you found it helpful. The plagiarism tool is pretty good to use because it basically googles a few sentences each in quotation marks. It's a great first-check, but only finds the most obvious plagiarism, so you'll still want to look a bit yourself if you're suspicious :)
Excellent sleuthing! I knew about the reverse-search and "quotes" in search engines, but did not know about the smallseotools.com site. Cool! Thanks for the tips! 😊 100% upvote!
Thank you, glad you learned something from this! :)
@surfknasen, is it plagiarism if you wrote it yourself on another platform? Some scientists have been caught plagiarising themselves! I don't think you can do that. So maybe not every post that has been publiczed before is plagiarism...
No of course not. Steemcleaners does verify their identity to confirm if they wrote it.
Great work..keep going....!!!
Thanks.
hahahahah. This is exactly what the movie, music and the book industry say.
They're right to say it. A lot of effort goes into writing well, or making music. It stings when someone else decides to take it easy and just take credit for our hard work.
I know that. Did my hahahahahaa sound evil lol.
Sort of. Someone who doesn't know you might misinterpret. Hence my poke. ;-)
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