Plagiarizing

It's only been a few days since the NeoGenesis Interview was posted, and there are already instances of plagiarism popping up.

We're hoping to stay positive about the whole affair and not point any fingers because it might have really just been an accident.

To make this clear, this is what plagiarism means to us here.

Plagiarism, for us, means that our content was taken by someone else, and the copier got the readership and visits, and we at Mou Ichido don't. The ladies at Monoxious sum this up quite well,  "We spent a good amount of effort and time making it and we would really appreciate that the entire tutorial [in our case, translation] isn’t copied and pasted on your blog even if you linked back cause no one’s gonna come to our blog if the information is duplicate. It is as good as stealing. Thank you."

You might be thinking, "Didn't you do this for the public good? Why's it matter if it gets posted here or somewhere else?"

Well, traffic tells us how we're doing, and it tells us how we can do things better. Lost traffic makes us think that we're maybe translating content that you don't think is important or interesting, and it'll make us do less. Maybe even stop.

In this instance, our entire translation was posted elsewhere. A tiny, nearly invisible, reference link was made at the very bottom, barely discernible from the surrounding text. The translator was not mentioned at the top, which implied that the site contributors and authors wrote it, which was not the case.  We're hoping that those who are doing this will read this post and stop doing so. We'll be monitoring these spots and attempt direct contact if nothing changes. If, still, nothing is done, we'll be making names public, and hope that our followers will support us.

This, of course, is not to discourage people from sharing our content. We really appreciate it when samples are posted elsewhere and people are lead here to read the entire thing. A paragraph sample preview on your personal blog or website with a link leading back here is fine, and, actually, thank you for doing so. But lifting our entire translation and, giving us a tiny pathetic reference link is not.

If you want to repost the entire thing for any reason at all (even in another language), please contact us. It's easy, fast, and, heck, we might even like your place so much that we'll tell others about it. Plus, you would've made some new friends.

So, bottom line, please stop taking our hard work, on accident or on purpose. We're doing this for you and for free.

-Thank you from the MIchi staff.

Posted in: 2010,MIchi