Guide Check for plagiarised content

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I came across this tool that lets you specify the link to a particular page and then searches for its copy. It’s a very useful tool to check plagiarism and of course to ensure that the content writing contests on TE go smoothly. :ohyeah:

 What it does is that it matches the words in the specified page to the pages in its cache and looks even for a partial match. Which means that the results might be inaccurate at times too, as it would match a string of words which could be common but have no relation whatsoever. However you get caught even if you've copied just one paragraph from a site. :P

 Another drawback is that it might give you results that may have changed over time and are not yet updated in its cache.

 Well now that we have set aside the drawbacks let me demonstrate the power of this nifty utility website.

 Open Copyscape

 The tagline - Searches for copies of your page on the Web; and quite rightly so.

So I randomly choose an article from our Guides and Tutorials section (ok it wasn’t random I selected 3-4 of them but lets focus on one).

 Guide to becoming a successful freelancer - by Amaresh



Seems fine as it was a contest winning entry after all. Alright so lets put this link in the bar and hit 'GO'



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 Holy crap it found 2 pages with similar content. Well this is where it lists out all the pages that match to the original content (or not so original content). But as I mentioned in the start that the results might be wrong too. Its possible that the number of matching words could be quite low, like 20 words, it might just be a co-incidence.

So how do we confirm that! Well we just follow the links.
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 Ok so at the top of the page it says, 'This page has 767 words matching your text as highlighted below'. That doesn’t look nice. Anyway lets scroll down.

Yep lots of words are highlighted. Are they copied? A whole sentence cannot be a co-incidence.

Well check for yourself... Guide to becoming a successful freelancer - by Amaresh

PS: You are allowed only 20 free searches per month. After that you have to pay 5 cents for each search.
 
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Well just for curiosity's sake I ran a check on this article and here are the results. :P Thats what I meant when I said copyscape may not be accurate all the time, so always check all the links.

Nevertheless the guide by amaresh is a rip-off. He didnt even care to rephrase in his own words. We apologize for the failure on our part as the guide by him violates the rules of the contest and we would take whatever steps necessary to salvage the situation. Of course we would run checks on other entries too.
 

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Awesome find. This link will go into my bookmark.

However, on positive side, lets accept that literature, be it on any topic, evolves. Evolves on the premises built by others. If he copied it and built on it, that only added to our knowledge. Of course i do not endorse copying when its a entry in a contest. But otherwise it would be fine, according to me, to bring something good to our knowledge base. Appropriate credits/links may be given if the actual author is confirmed.
 
p_sam21 said:
However, on positive side, lets accept that literature, be it on any topic, evolves. Evolves on the premises built by others. If he copied it and built on it, that only added to our knowledge. Of course i do not endorse copying when its a entry in a contest. But otherwise it would be fine, according to me, to bring something good to our knowledge base. Appropriate credits/links may be given if the actual author is confirmed.
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You are absolutely right, thats how everything should work, it should be built upon to progress. However from where I see it, its a case of just adding the screeshots. The text is copy pasted. :no: And yes we dont disallow any form of copied content, the source should be mentioned. A contest is absolutely a different story.
 
I just copy and paste some sentences to see if it is plagiarsied . google will tell me :) . the same way how I nabbed 3-4 people here in TE :P
 
broar94 said:
I just copy and paste some sentences to see if it is plagiarsied . google will tell me :) . the same way how I nabbed 3-4 people here in TE :P
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Absolutely.... you said it.... I used to do this too...
 
yes that works if someone has copy pasted everything. what you are doing is like playing a roulette, sampling. you wont run the check in google for every line.
 
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