Stealing Other People's Work

[Grape 528]

I remember way back in my youth, probably like 2nd or 3rd grade, my teacher assigned us a project. We were to make a children’s book on a topic that interested us. I decided to make a book about betta fish. When introducing the project, the teacher gave us a cute little talk about plagiarism, and some basic dos and don’ts on researching and using sources in your own work. It was a brief discussion, as we were kids and were pretty much just reciting basic factoids and whatnot about our topic, but it was done to introduce us to research itself. This was expanded upon and gone in a bit more depth upon entering middle school. As research projects became more popular and utilized in pretty much every class, teachers began stressing the importance of proper citations and paraphrasing, avoiding plagiarizing, and interpreting sources, as well as grading harsher and harsher based on errors pertaining to those. It’s been basically drilled into all our heads at one point or another of our lives and it’s been made very clear that stealing other people’s work is wrong, and should be punished.

 

Ever since I’ve joined the VHL, I’ve always been a fan of the VHLM. The vast majority of my articles, podcasts, and other TPE related activities has been focused on the M. My giant spreadsheet that breaks down every team started out as purely being for the VHLM, and I only expanded it to the other two leagues out of boredom. I update the M portion practically daily, while the VHL gets looked at maybe once a week and the E maybe a few times a season. I’ve dedicated a lot of time learning about the M and how it works, eventually getting a GM gig in the league and I really have little desire to move on from that, at least for now. I would wager that, out of the active members at least, I put out arguably the most M content. Likewise, I love reading articles about the M, as I really enjoy seeing other people showing the same enjoyment as I have for the league. Because of my passion for the league, I pretty much read every single article that gets put out regarding the league. So, when it comes to making content about the M, it probably is not the smartest idea to plagiarize from me.

 

A few days after posting my Season 91 VHLM Rankings, I was sitting around in class, bored as hell, and decided to take a bit of a gander at some of the media spots that have been put out, and I notice this nice little article by @LastOneUp also looking at the VHLM for this season . As I started reading, I thought to myself, “huh, this looks really similar to my article”. I shared both his and mine with a handful of people, and they also agreed that these articles were a bit too similar to be a simple coincidence. Later on, I went to his profile and saw that he also made a smaller article, going over the same thing, and I thought, “wow, this looks really similar to my article”. And props to him for pulling out a couple tried-and-true methods, like changing the wording slightly, and swapping the order for a couple of the teams, just to make it look original. It’s one thing to agree on a handful of points, but it’s another to basically repeat every single point I made. The second, shorter article was much more blatant. I’ll point out a couple key indicators of plagiarism for y’all in case you don’t feel like looking for them yourselves:

- In both articles, he finds it important to mention the peculiarity of Houston’s three defenseman system, something that I brought up and is only supported by my own anecdotal evidence. Is having three defensemen actually bad for a team, I don’t really know.
- For Vegas, he mentions the “dylan” curse, a term that I made up in my article and, from my knowledge, has never been used by anyone except for me in this singular instance.
- In his small article, he copies the order in which I ranked the teams. In his larger article, however, he swaps the order for a couple teams. You would think, especially based on how closely both his articles were made, that he would have the same ordering for both. 

- Probably the most damning one. In my article I compared Mexico City and San Diego. In his small article, he attempts to do the same, but he has “similarly” on San Diego, which he ranked below Mexico City. There is nothing similar between San Diego and Halifax bud.

 

Look, I don’t have a monopoly on VHLM rankings. If you want to do them, feel free to do so. I would love to see more M content. The majority of content made is about the VHL, and I feel that the lower leagues need a little more appreciation (although the E can stay barren cuz bad league). If you’re gonna do it, however, make it original. I take a lot of pride in my work and it’s very upsetting to see it be blatantly stolen and pawned off as someone else's. I mean, that short article wasn’t even trying to hide it. If you really really really can’t think of stuff on your own and want to use someone else’s work, at the very least throw in some citations. Every lil tidbit you took from my article and slammed into yours, slap a “(Grape, 2023)” at the end of it. Once you reach the end of your article, be sure to include your sources like so:

              Grape. (2023, November 1). S91 VHLM Team Rankings. Victory Hockey League. https://vhlforum.com/topic/142056-s91-vhlm-team-rankings/

 

APA format is also acceptable since this is somewhat research oriented, but I feel like MLA fits this the best. Whichever you feel like using is fine by me, so long as you give proper credit.

(1007 words, all my own)

[Spartan 4,003]

Is plagiarism a mods tag or a blues tag, honestly don't know

[dlamb 1,299]

The longer article (and maybe the smaller one too) are almost assuredly using your article fed directly into ChatGPT as well lmao

[MubbleFubbles 1,197]

Interestingly, it doesn't look like this is a one-off, a vhl.com piece  they wrote is essentially re-doing a lot of points from @Alex Season 90 Playoff Preview (with it being most blatant as they refer to Brian Kowalski and James Marino as forwards, which could only have happened through misinterpreting the VSN article). 

 

[Grape 528]

1 hour ago, Spartan said:

Is plagiarism a mods tag or a blues tag, honestly don't know

Whoever's the principal I suppose

[Alex 2,876]

1 hour ago, MubbleFubbles said:

Interestingly, it doesn't look like this is a one-off, a vhl.com piece  they wrote is essentially re-doing a lot of points from @Alex Season 90 Playoff Preview (with it being most blatant as they refer to Brian Kowalski and James Marino as forwards, which could only have happened through misinterpreting the VSN article). 

 

Yeah… I don’t think you’re wrong here. Seems almost uncanny

[rory 1,759]

[twists 276]

Spoiler

 

[LastOneUp 160]

I think it's super embarrassing you put so much time into this and took this so personally. It was offseason, I had nothing to write about so I used info in your article to learn about and rewrite another version of the rankings. Big fucking deal. Cry me a river. You're such a victim of this monster that had a similar article in this fake hockey community, boo hoo. 

[Grape 528]

22 minutes ago, LastOneUp said:

I think it's super embarrassing you put so much time into this and took this so personally.

Idk only really took 30 minutes out of my day so not really that much time.

[Doomsday 4,041]

6 hours ago, LastOneUp said:

I think it's super embarrassing you put so much time into this and took this so personally. It was offseason, I had nothing to write about so I used info in your article to learn about and rewrite another version of the rankings. Big fucking deal. Cry me a river. You're such a victim of this monster that had a similar article in this fake hockey community, boo hoo. 

 

[BOOM 8,426]

[Grape 528]

Claiming week 2