Re^2: How should Perlmonks deal with Plagiarism?

[creamygoodness]

I think the costs are more significant than that. A lot of talented people spent a lot of time thinking hard, finding solutions, crafting answers, testing code, and posting their responses, when there wasn't actually any need for them to do so. The plagiarized posts often seem like good topics, and on some level it's sort of nice to have a local archive of answers. But since those questions were already answered at least once before elsewhere on the web, duplicating that effort is of limited value. (Especially since searching PerlMonks is more difficult than it ought to be.)

That's a lot of hours frittered away, and for what? A couple fools got inflated PerlMonks XP? It's a real boggle that these two would so cavalierly waste our precious time and expertise for something so trivial.

[halley]

If it's a waste of people's time to think about Perl and type their thoughts, then why is it here? Just because the twit didn't have a genuine need doesn't mean that the question itself has no value to the community as a whole, nor the outsider who searches.

Searching perlmonks directly is rarely the avenue a newcomer takes. They've never heard of perlmonks until they google for "perl matching balanced text" and gotten a couple hits here. And as you say, searching is harder than it should be; more ways to phrase a solution is more ways to find it with a global deep search like google, et al. How do you measure the number of people who find their answers and leave satisfied without ever signing up or replying to a node?

[grep]

The main reason I choose to waste (spend) my time answering questions is I want to help someone who legitimately needs help. I'm positive that a good number of monks here feel the same way. If I stop believing that, I have little incentive to answer someone's question. That would hurt the community.

If you read some of the plagiarized nodes (particularly where one answers the other) you can quite plainly see that they didn't understand the question or the answer they pasted (generally way off topic). Learning was not the purpose of their post. It's a waste of our time.

As for outsiders who search - Then they should presumably be able to find the original content. Lets say a perl beginner finds a PM node in question here, there's a good chance the earliest reply (remember AM's have replies sorted by post time) is reply from the one of the participants. Which means there's a good chance that the first reply is a completely off-topic and wrong.

[spiritway]

You've got a point, but remember that the people who post a question and get answers are not necessarily the ones who benefit most from the effort the Monks make. Countless times, I have found really interesting, useful, helpful information in answers to other peoples' questions, and I'm sure this happens a lot. In other words, just because the person asking the question may not have a clue, that doesn't mean efforts to answer the question are wasted. I believe that your efforts (and those of the other Monks) help far more people than you'll ever realize. I don't believe they're wasted. If anyone is wasting their time, it's the people who post things they copy and don't understand. I, for one, am grateful to you and the other Monks who take the time to answer questions I didn't ask - sometimes I don't even know I *should* be asking that question. Your efforts are not wasted.

[creamygoodness]

They've never heard of perlmonks until they google for "perl matching balanced text" and gotten a couple hits here.

I'm guessing you didn't actually try that. No hits in the top 100 results for me. It's easy to understand why, when you look at the PerlMonks robots.txt file.