How I, as a Moderator, Check for Plagiarism

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.

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