Dennis Hackethal's Defense for Plagiarism

[Elliot]

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://curi.us/2608-dennis-hackethals-defense-for-plagiarism

[Elliot]

@Neo Does this and Curiosity – Dennis Hackethal Is a Bully address your concerns?

[ActiveMind]

This post addressed my small doubts about your views on plagiarism and your older blog posts. Also good analysis of Hackethal’s tactics, misquoting and the different contexts you were writing in.

I’ll still read all of Hackethal’s posts and critically examine the whole situation. I’ll at least post some of my notes after I make them.

[Neo]

@Elliot

Does this and Curiosity – Dennis Hackethal Is a Bully address your concerns?

Yes, it does.

My main concerns about the plagiarism dispute were basically these:

1. I wasn’t sure what your definition of plagiarism actually was. It didn’t feel clearly stated to me.

2. Whatever standard you were using, I wasn’t sure you were applying it consistently, including to your own writing.

On concern #1 you do clarify your definition here:

@Elliot

Hackethal presents inaccurate information about what I think plagiarism is and he doesn’t specify what he thinks it is. I’ll clarify: Plagiarism is taking credit for ideas or knowledge that you got from a source rather than creating yourself. Or, as I put it in 2020 when criticizing Hackethal’s book: Plagiarism is taking credit for ideas or writing that isn’t yours. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines plagiarism as: the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own The Macmillan English Dictionary defines plagiarism as: the process of taking another person’s work, ideas, or words, and using them as if they were your own. The Oxford English Dictionary defines plagiarize as: to take and use as one’s own the thoughts, writings, or inventions of another. These all say pretty much the same thing. I think it’s important to understand that any type of knowledge can be plagiarized, even if it’s not in words or doesn’t resemble a scientific theory.

To me, that definition sounds pretty standard, and between this post and your earlier essays, you’ve given enough examples that I get what you mean. It’s not some mysterious or ultra-specific definition. I can see how applying it can get messy in edge cases, but that’s exactly the kind of thing people should debate and criticise directly. And from what I can tell, Dennis didn’t really do that. He didn’t clearly argue against your definition, and he didn’t seem to defend the specific passages in his book by laying out where the ideas came from.

On concern #2, your breakdown of his examples and quoting made me realize I should’ve been more skeptical. I think I took a lot of what he said close to face value (briefly reading some of his examples he linked or quoted) and there wasn’t really a good reason for me to do that without checking more thoroughly.

Also, I appreciate the part where you explained what matters most to you. With misquotes, you care most about whether the meaning is represented accurately, not whether someone changed a tab to spaces. With plagiarism, you care most about whether someone is misleading people about credit, not the exact formatting or where a citation appears. That clears up something I was worried about. I was concerned you might be being overly strict or pedantic, but I don’t think that anymore.