Blogging and Plagiarism
It came to light in the comments on my post “On Following God and A Man” that Rollo Tomassi, a.k.a. The Rational Male, had apparently plagiarised Laura Grace Robins with his post, The Wife Whisperer. I am going to lay this out and let you decide for yourselves.
The post was verbatim taken from elsewhere on the web and was not cited. So it appears that he tried to pass off someone else’s work as his own, lapped up the praise, and only gave credit once busted, having not mentioned anywhere in his post previously that the work wasn’t his own. This either shows intentional deceit or total incompetence. As someone who puts a lot of work into what I do, I would hate to have someone trying to pass off my work as their own and then taking credit for it. That is bad form and deserves to be called out.
Once discovered, Rollo offered up an explanation:
My bad, I had drawn the original from another forum thread and didn’t have the original link to credit. I’ve corrected this now.
The original forum link he posted to show where he’d got it from did not contain the words “Wife Whisperer”, which he used as the title and which was the title of the original post by Laura Grace Robins both at her blog and at In Mala Fide. It’s possible that this was unintentional (and a remnant recollection from reading the original back in 2010); however, it doesn’t change the fact that at no time before this was exposed as non-original, did Rollo attempt to dissuade his readers that he did not in fact write the piece himself. He may have thought no one would notice copying this off a forum, forgetting that this had already been posted by the original author somewhere at sometime (actually at least 2 times). Maybe it is a coincidence that he used the same title as used in the original, which words were not included in the forum copy, where he claimed to be “the wife whisperer,” but still he did not give a citation. He should have stated that he found it and the original author was missing, but then again a quick google search of the title (or of a key phrase in the body of the piece) would have found that. Again, this appears to be either deceit or incompetence.
I cannot imagine willingly accepting praise for something I hadn’t created myself. This is the kind of action that would disgrace a serious writer and no blogger who cares about the integrity of his own work or the blogosphere in general should simply say, “oh well, never mind” when another blogger shows this kind of lack of integrity. Of course ideas are not born in a vacuum and we all share and borrow and build on each other’s work. What we should not be doing is copying and pasting an entire post without at least acknowledging where we found it and, if we don’t know who wrote it, to add that if anyone knows who did to let us know.
If Rollo would like to admit that he screwed up by attempting to pass the work off as his own, he will come off looking a lot better than he has thus far, by trying to hide the hole he has dug.
On this Good Friday, we should all reflect on the phrase, “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” from the Confiteor.
I confess to almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault; therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels and Saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God.
CL
7man
Recent Comments