How I, as a Moderator, Check for Plagiarism

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This article is a result of a direct question from @wakeupkitty about how to detect plagiarism and spam. Instead of giving a lengthy reply in a comment, I decided to make a post of this, because the topic is important.

This is how I do it so far. It is not perfect, but I had to do something. Anyone having anything useful to add, please do so as a comment.

First I must say that I have just recently started with this. Originally, I set up my first communities to keep my own articles available, sorted by topic. Just after that, read.cash announced changes, which slightly changed the role played by communities, so I decided to open them up for other authors as well. I did not want to have all sort of rubbish there, however, so I decided to be very strict. But on two points I have already lowered the requirement slightly, and that is in the use of English and Punctuation/Editing. I allow some weaknesses there, because new authors should be given a chance to develop. Nobody is perfect in the beginning. Sometimes I might suggest improvements, and I hope that is taken for what it is, constructive criticism.

Here I also want to say that you can submit any author's article to your community, if you want it there. You don't have to wait for the author to do it.

Posts/Articles

So, when an article is submitted, what do I do?

I read it. Does the author have anything to say? Is it pertinent? Does it deal with the topic of the community? If it aspires of teaching something, is it doing that in a clear way and does the author appear to know what he/she is writing about? If all these questions can be answered with yes, I open and look at other articles of the same author. Is the style consistent? I also look at comments and how they answer to comments. Can they discuss the topics of their texts?

How is the editing and the language? Small weaknesses here can be acceptable, and they indicate that the text is not copied. A perfect text raises immediate suspicion of copy pasting, especially if the author otherwise has shown not to master English perfectly - as is the case with many members of read.cash.

Finally, I run various paragraphs in Google. Presto! In a vast majority of cases I find the same text elsewhere, sometimes in many places, and in connections clearly showing that the poster at read.cash is not the original author.

Read.cash also stated in a comment to one of my previous articles, About Submitting Articles to Communities, that their OC detector will soon be available for moderators. That will add another useful tool to our arsenal.

While time is going, one learns to know some of the authors and know they can be trusted not to steal material, then it can be justified to relax the controls for their writings.

Comments

As for comments, that is up to each and every author. It is sometimes hard to see immediately if something is spam. But if there is a comment that seems unrelated to your article, that's the easy one to find, especially if the user turns up repeatedly, commenting many articles in a similar way. Just block that user.

There are also those copy pasting another comment from the same article; then it is just to use the block function again. But be sure to block the copying one, not the original.

Some of the spammers made an art of balancing on the borderline and it can take a while before it is clear if this is spam or not. But they are almost always overdoing it, they turn up all the time and after a while you can see that their words are not really related to the article they comment on, even if they sometimes try to vary their sentences in a way creating some connection.

As for comments developing to discussions which sometimes lead away from the topic of the article, I choose not to delete or block them as long as it is a real discussion held in a civil way. However, if there would turn up any aggressive tendencies, I would remove that and block the perpetrator. That has not happened so far, though.

I have created a community dedicated to Moderation etc. If these questions interest you, please join About Communities, Moderation and Combatting Plagiarism & Spam (ba97).

Copyright © 2020 Meleonymica/Mictorrani. All Rights Reserved.

(If you liked this, please consider leaving a tip, either here or via CoinTr.ee)

You find all my writings on Read.Cash, sorted by topic, here.

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Comments

I initially as a moderator never used to check for plagiarism just for the content. But it is very important to check for plagiarism. A note to all the moderators here.

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4 years ago

If you are a moderator, please join my new community https://read.cash/c/about-communities-moderation-and-combatting-plagiarism-spam-ba97 I hope to be able to gather material relevant for a moderator there.

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4 years ago

Will do!

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4 years ago

That's very informative, but it means a lot of checking for you to do. If every article is treated the way you described it, it might take ages to check all of the submitted articles. You need some other tools to help you as a moderator. Maybe the OC lock will make things a bit easier.

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4 years ago

It will. But it is not all that time-consuming, every step goes quickly when you have done it a few times. I have quickly found the plagiarism in most cases. Unfortunately, I don't get to approve many articles, I have rejected most of the submitted ones. Either for plagiarism, completely wrong topic for the community, or just sheer bad writing which doesn't say anything.

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4 years ago

Well I hate to say it but probably moderating will be harder when the new changes of Read.cash are active. There will probably a tsunami of submited articles which needs checking.

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4 years ago

Perhaps so, yes. Already now it is much, some people send their articles to 10 or more communities without paying attention to if it is the right topic or not. These are quickly rejected. It takes a millisecond to see that something doesn't even belong to the right topic.

But I need to find suitable co-moderators. At least one more for each community. That will take time, however.

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4 years ago

hmmm...I can't promise but maybe I can help as a co-moderator. What do you think?

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4 years ago

You must know something about the topic. I have many communities, which one do you mean? The new one about Moderation etc?

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4 years ago

That's the problem. I don't know what to moderate exactly haha and most important I'm not sure if i can do that or not. We don't want to keep the conversation here so i will text you on telegram. Not sure if that will be tonight or tomorrow. I found what the problem of the phone is but still didn't fix it. I will soon hopefully.

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4 years ago

Ok. We can keep it mind about you being a co-moderator and discuss it further on Telegram later. If you cannot do it, you can learn.

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4 years ago

盗まれたコンテントの上にバンハッメルをもってるなければ無くない。 ふつ、本文のいっぴき文せつで、にせもあれば、見られる。

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4 years ago

はい、しかし、この泥棒はとにかく簡単に見つけることができます。

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4 years ago

The article is very interesting, I have not been in read cash for a long time, but everything that is being implemented is good, and what damages is to be eliminated, restricted, I do not speak English, and my language is Spanish, I use the translator and my Sometimes publications do not go right sometimes, but I try to do my best to correct them, in your communities what language do you use to know,? keep bringing publications to learn ...

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4 years ago

I know several languages, but here I write in English and my communities use English only. You mean you use a machine translator? They are always bad.

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4 years ago

I use the one that I have at my fingertips that of google, and it has helped me to understand part of the languages here.

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4 years ago

That's good then. All ways are good if they works. But you cannot write an article in Spanish and translate it to English with Google and publish it like that. It becomes terrible. Perhaps understandable, but not more.

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4 years ago

Thanks for your suggestion, which tool can I search on the internet to help me with translations?

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4 years ago

I'm sorry, I think you misunderstood me. I don't know any machine translator able to translate a whole text without a lot of errors. If you use one, you must be able to make a lot of manual corrections afterwards.

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4 years ago

I understood well everything you wrote, I will look for information on the other hand, this is not an obstacle for me, thank you.

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4 years ago

You are really doing a good job. We really need to support read.cash to get rid of plagiarism as well as spamming. I need to say this that some community creators are not helping read.cash by accepting articles into their platforms without following the recommendations of the moderators. I have my evidences, hence I will cease to be a moderator in a particular community. A writer submitted an article, I asked the writer to provide evidence of permission by the original author quoted to use the work. Alas! Within a few minutes, the article appeared on the home page.

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4 years ago

Yes, that is sad to see. I have also seen some very badly managed communities here.

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4 years ago

It's a really nice strategy you have designed here for moderating articles... Though most might say it's really extreme but it good you consider new authors like myself who are just starting out.

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4 years ago

Yes, I think new authors must be given a chance to practise, learn and develop their ability.

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4 years ago

Seems like some good methods you are using. Thank you for your help to clean up the community. I will be going through some of my posts and blocking the spam commenters as well.

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4 years ago

Yes, that is a work that seem never to end. They soon open a new account and then they return again, sometimes to old posts.

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4 years ago

I subscribed you ,you do post good articles everytime..check out mine and subscribe me please

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4 years ago

I am just at this moment reading through all your articles here so far.

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4 years ago

Thank you for a meaningful article. I have an issue with inconsistencies with flagging plagiarism. For instance where two different authors use the same reference document to write an article. The one article gets flagged as plagiarised and the other not. To make it even more confusing, the one article gets flagged as plagiarised from the other article, which uses the same reference material!

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4 years ago

That sounds complicated. You say "flagged", are you using some sort of OC detector? Anyway, you will have to inspect and determine that manually in a case like that.

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4 years ago

Well I am an MBA student, I can use these tips for my academic papers I guess 😀

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4 years ago

Plagiarism? Haha... well, are you joking or serious?

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4 years ago

Well even if it is ur data but you don't qoute correctly still it is classified as plagiarism. So the idea is be orignal as mentioned in the acticle also

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4 years ago

Yes, you are correct. I though that one was a joke, but better to be clear. Thank you for that comment.

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4 years ago

If all these questions can be answered with yes, I open and look at other articles of the same author. Is the style consistent?

I probably wouldn't pass your review. I'm not even sure my articles have any style. 😉. Seriously now. You're doing it right. I wish all moderators would do that.

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4 years ago

Well, I judge by the whole picture. Furthermore, I have come to know you a little, you are one of those I would not suspect of plagiarism.

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4 years ago

I am really happy to read this and will check out google presto. The rest is clear to me. So far I did not block anyone and really hope it's not necessary. I'll join the community for moderators and hope @heartbeat1515 will too. Thanks a lot. 💕

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4 years ago

Now-a-days there in no exc marks in any orginal article of read.cash.Why this is happening?

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3 years ago

That function disappeared a time ago and does not seem to return.

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3 years ago

You described it soo well...the tips are way too helpful..thanks for sharing it

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4 years ago

You're welcome. Hope it can be of use to you. We need to get rid of all those who are just abusing the system.

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4 years ago

You are doing a great job for a community moderator, i haven't gone this far and strict about article approval on my community. I will definitely do more like you to keep spammer away from my community

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4 years ago

Thank you. Yes, I wish all moderators would be more thorough. Anyway, you are welcome here.

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4 years ago

Ha disregard my last post on the community article I just realized that you ARE a moderator. That’s cool you’re writing articles too to help users better understand the read.cash systematics

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4 years ago

I am a moderator to several communities. As for helping users understand read.cash, I didn't care about that before, but I discovered that a lot of people here have no idea about how it works and read.cash is changing things all the time, sometimes without saying anything.

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4 years ago