1UP, Plagiarizing, and Other Bits of Joy

Nathan writes "1up recently posted their Dead or Alive 4 strategy guide on their website. It didn't take long for users at the Dead or Alive Central forums to recognize their hard work analyzing the fighting game engine had been blatantly pasted into the strategy guide without any credit given whatsoever. While movelists are largely factual and can be argued to be public knowledge, the most incriminating evidence is the section on the evasion system, which had been pasted into the 1up guide with a few reworded sentences. Discussions are ongoing at Gaming Age Forums (with 1up members defending the writer of the guide) and DoA Central. Perhaps the most interesting bit about this is that just a month or two ago, Dan Hsu from EGM and 1up had famously written an editorial criticizing shady ongoings at other publications." I've reread the different pieces, and while I think the DoA Forums are a large basis of work, people need to read Kate Turabian's on how to cite research because I don't see this as plagiarism in the whole - just poorly cited. Update: 01/23 22:20 GMT by Z : 1up has announced that they've pulled the guide to review the situation.

How do you cite combo strings?

[eldavojohn]

I had some problems with this article submission and kind of wondered why I was reading it exactly.

1UP, Plagiarizing, and Other Bits of Joy

Where are said "Other Bits of Joy"? All I found was a DoA guide which looked a lot like forum material at DoACentral and then I subsequently found two forums full of flame posts and colorful language. None of which was joyful in the least.

I did enjoy Hsu's blog [1up.com] which was discussed but not linked in the article.

I've reread the different pieces, and while I think the DoA Forums are a large basis of work, people need to read Kate Turabian's on how to cite research because I don't see this as plagiarism in the whole - just poorly cited.

I went to Kate Turabian's site. Nowhere did I find evidence of how to cite string combos from gaming websites. I found "non-periodical internet sources" but they were stealing their words, they were stealing their research in a game. Ironically, I believe the inventors of those combos (the programmers and authors of DoA) would be the sole owners.

Furthermore, who do you give credit to? The forum owners? The owners of the posts? If it's the owners of the posts, how do you acquire their real names? Should I be writing "Taken from a post by worksucks69 at DoACentral"? And how do I know that this material wasn't ganked from some other website without my knowledge? What are you to do if you want good information from a forum but it is in no way credible?

Not Plagiarism?

[aryanproletarian]

"...I don't see this as plagiarism in the whole - just poorly cited." It's widely accepted that poor citing == plagiarism.

Lesson Learned

[mslinux]

I once showed a script I wrote to a guy who heads IT security in our company. A few months later in a company newsletter he mentioned the script, how it had helped find and resolve a serious security falw and how he had submitted it to a 3rd party security organization for review. He took full credit for everything and ended up getting an interview with SANS. Granted, the guy is higher up the corporate ladder than me, but he's not my boss and my name was never mentioned as being the autor of the script. For me, this was a lesson learned.
 
I'll never show this dude a script again! Now, I understand how he got to where he is... making friends with smart people and using their work to gain a reputation that he does not deserve.

Culture of Copy and Paste

[gadlaw]

Anywhere I go on the web to find information I see the same thing. Whether it's a Doom walkthrough or a guitar tab/chord guide for the latest song it's the same thing. One person did some work and everybody else with a site is there to copy and paste that work to their own site. Melissa Etheridge's 'Closer to Fine' guitar tab for instance. I've found that one tab at a ton of sites, not one site bothering to change one word of the introduction from the one person who tabbed out the song. Go look at Google News and find all the related stories under one header and you'll find 1000 stories, all the same. Same words and sometimes attributed to a wireservice report. Now just let me copy and paste this comment into my Digg comment on the same story. No use fighting against the tide here.

Copyright

[ezratrumpet]

If the TOS for the boards says, "Anything you post becomes our property to be done with as we wish," there's not a lot of recourse for anyone. The writers all agreed to the TOS in order to post, and the board managers turned it all into a manual. Odious, but within the letter of the law - provided that the TOS was bulletproof. Another reason to read those things closely......

speaking of plagiarism

[jeffehobbs]

Speaking of plagiarism, this slashdot user [slashdot.org] has ripped all the content right out of here [4q.cc], without attribution, and is taking credit, getting mainstream press and making money off selling t-shirts as a result. I think that is so shitty; like a link to the original source would kill him or something.

~jeff

Re:Copyright

[faceless]

You seem to have missed a few of the details along the way. The posts on the DOA Central forums were sourced into a guide on 1up.com. It wasn't the DOA Central admins who did it, it was a 1up.com staffer/freelancer named Richard Li.

This isn't about an admin stickying posts or compiling them on the same site for better clarity/reading/etc, it's about someone else on another site jacking the strategy for their job...