Summaries that are plagiarized will be summarily deleted .....
 

Yes, I know it's in the rules, but apparently many new and anonymous members don't read our rules. The next time I see a HUGE summary on the background of a gun, I will take selected sentences and google it. Chances are it is lifted wholesale from another site, mostly Wikipedia. Since IMFDB doesn't allow plagiarism in our writing, all that stuff will be deleted on the spot.

Just posting this as a sort of announcement. I'm not going to even ask the person to re-write it. They should know the rules. Now I'm not talking about banning anyone. Most of the time it is done by anonymous IP addresses who make a bunch of changes and Poof! They lose interest and disappear from IMFDB forever, leaving their mark on our site, like the urine stains of a stray dog.

This is just a reminder, (a) not to do it and (b) to edit it or delete it when you see it yourselves. :) Thanks for listening.

How can you tell if a summary has been plagiarized?

You take sentences out of it and google the sentence. Usually it's pretty clear when Google kicks back a paragraph from a site like Wikipedia or IMDB. In the case of guns, usually the plagiarist swipes entire paragraphs about the gun from Wikipedia. In the case of Movie/TV show summaries you have to check IMDB for the same title.

We don' want anyone to think we're wholesale pirates of other people's work, via the written word. And we've already discussed the use of screencaps in journalistic, critical review or educational articles.

I haven't seen any. Is it really that common?