Re^3: How should Perlmonks deal with Plagiarism?

[halley]

in reply to Re^2: How should Perlmonks deal with Plagiarism?
in thread How should Perlmonks deal with Plagiarism?

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?

[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.

[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.