Whilst browsing this website last night, something began to bother me. I looked at the writing on the opening page, which is pretty garbled, then looked at the writing on various pages, like the biographies of Thomas Hardy and Judi Dench and the articles about some places, which was all very articulate and grammatically correct. I started to smell a rat. So I did that thing that you do when you're testing for plagiarism: I copied and pasted a couple of passages, in inverted commas, into Google. Lo and behold - whole articles came up as existing elsewhere (and presumably these are the sources for the material in The Albion Chronicles). Bear in mind that these same articles on the Albion Chronicles contain no attributions at all, so the implication is that the authors of that site have written them. Indeed, I assumed that the authors of the site had written them, until it became clear that this was far from the truth. Some articles, like the Thomas Hardy, are copied and pasted completely from another site. Others, like the one about Coggeshall and Judi Dench, are a paragraph here and there from several sites, including the BBC! This is really bad practice. If a kid at school did it, they'd be facing exclusion for plagiarism. If you copy something that you have not written, you must both gain the permission of the person who HAS written it, and also credit them for their work. I thought this would be pretty obvious to anybody, but the owners of the site might like to review their practice before they find themselves in some serious trouble. :0)
|