 Ahoy, ahoy. The SCP Wiki has removed at least one highly popular and very influential work over charges of plagiarism. So today we're going to talk a little bit about how you may be wrong about plagiarism. First of all, it's important to understand that plagiarism and copyright infringement are not the same thing. Copyright infringement is something you can get in trouble for regardless of if you're plagiarizing or not because it's simply using somebody else's work without their permission or in some way that goes against their license. Plagiarism, on the other hand, is the usage of somebody else's work in a setting where originality would be expected and claiming that that work is yours or through omission allowing other people to assume that work is yours. And you might be asking yourself, why is this such a big deal on the SCP Wiki? Well, the SCP Wiki may have foundations in plagiarism, but they have done a lot in recent years to try and get past that reputation and reality and turn themselves into a more upstanding collection of fictional works. And when I say plagiarism, what most people don't understand is that taking an image from somewhere else on the internet and putting it on your own work would be a form of plagiarism. So the SCP 173 was originally a plagiarized work because first of all, a majority of its content and appeal was in the image, not necessarily the text. The text was secondary. And that's true of a lot of series one articles as well. However, the SCP Wiki doesn't really treat that form of plagiarism, which is by definition plagiarism does not treat that type of plagiarism the same as literary or academic plagiarism. Academic plagiarism is the idea that you will never use anybody else's work in your own creative endeavors. So if you're writing a paper on Othello, you would never ever go on the internet find somebody else's thing and just paraphrase it, which is a good thing. You shouldn't do that. That's academic plagiarism. You can get in a lot of trouble for academic plagiarism, actually. In some cases, very rarely, there are criminal penalties for it, but often not. Journalism is the same way. However, fiction has always been a little bit more loosey-goosey with their definitions of what is and isn't plagiarism. And that's where we get to the SCP Wiki's problem. Now, as I said earlier, it kind of has a foundation in plagiarism, but it's the kind of plagiarism that doesn't involve the written word. So the people who write for the SCP Wiki are very strongly against any plagiarism involving the written word, up to the point where it's actually more academic than literary plagiarism that they're fighting against. Actually, it may be fair to say it's actually somewhere in the middle. But the really important thing to know is that right now, there is a drive to remove several pieces of work from the SCP Wiki that involved some form of plagiarism. Now, if we're going to talk about this, we have to go all the way back to 2015, actually mid-2015, to an article that a lot of off-site fans might recognize called the Mute, or Mute, however you want to pronounce it. The problem with the Mute was that the image was stolen. Originally, that was all that was considered to be wrong. However, the image was stolen along with a block of text, and that is where the SCP Wiki draws the line. It's not actually true, by the way. They've cracked down a lot more on image stealing recently than they used to, which actually has something to do with me. Back when I was a staff, I kind of pushed that pretty hard. Important thing to understand about the Mutes was that since part of it was stolen from an Etsy listing of some dolls that someone had created, that... I mean, it's very simple here. Meet the Mutes. The Mutes are magical leaders from places far away, but it's right next to your dreams. What's the first line of the Etsy listing? The Mutes are meet the Mutes. The Mutes are magical creatures from a place that is so far away, it's right next to your dreams. This was stolen word for word, I think. Yeah. The whole thing is 100% word for word from the Etsy listing. That's a problem. And I was involved pretty heavily in fixing this problem. Now back then, there was a little bit more of a looser feel to the idea of correcting this thing. Nowadays, the policy would be to delete it completely. However, at the time, our policy was, let's find out what the heck's going on here. So they contacted the original author. And by they, I mean, I did, because I was their person that tracked this person down and I'm the one that contacted them. I tracked down the original author from the Etsy listing and asked them, hey, what's up? After enough back and forth, the agreement was essentially that it needed to stay on the wiki because it was driving some traffic to this person's Etsy at the first place, but the Etsy is actually defunct now. And that we should include a link to their Amazon, to an Amazon link to their novel to give them some traffic. So everyone felt like that was a decent, well, not everyone. There was some people who disagreed with that. But most people felt like that was an equitable arrangement. We'd stolen from this person. We were continuing to benefit from it. We're going to continue to benefit from it, even if we delete it. So let's let them benefit from it by being able to link directly out to them. So metaphysician is a writer for the SCP wiki and is one of the most more influential of authors are going to find because they essentially started sarcasm, which is God, it's popular. And it's driven also the Church of the Broken Gods modern portrayal as well. So again, incredibly influential and prolific, I believe, author. Here's the thing, at least two, if not three of their earliest works, I think it might be just two. I don't want to overstate this. Two of their earliest works were plagiarized. Now, when we say plagiarism here, they were not stolen from people. I believe they were stolen from people, but these people were been dead for several thousand years. They had stolen public domain works and included sections of them in their articles and forgot about it. I mean, personally, knowing a little bit about metaphysician as I do, they have a memory problem. They have some problems with their memory. There's a whole bunch of stuff. In fact, I'm going to give you a little bit of a response from metaphysician a little bit later in this video so you can kind of get an idea of what I'm talking about. But I mean, I already knew that they kind of and their process is completely different from mine. I would never grab a chunk of, well, maybe I would. Maybe maybe there's some future point where this actually happens. But I couldn't imagine myself grabbing a chunk of public domain text, dropping it into my draft and going, I'll fix that later. But I can conceive of someone else doing it and not having any kind of malicious intent. The problem I always had with the initial plagiarism, personally, because I pushed pretty hard for a metaphysician to be banned for it. Their first time it happened was because of a line called I was inspired by these previously extant works. That's a problem for me because when you say you're inspired by something, you're literally making a claim that what you created was original. Sure, it may be similar to the thing that you were inspired by, but it is yours. Saying you were inspired by something is not saying I'm giving credit to this thing. It's saying I created this thing based on something else. It is a claim of originality, which makes it clear cut 100% plagiarism. And it's easy to say that metaphysician forgot that they included those bits and they were inspired elsewise by that text. But at the same time, saying that and doing that is plagiarism. Regardless of if you meant to or not, plagiarism can be involuntary. It can happen without you knowing you did it. And because of this person's writing process, which involves sometimes borrowing from a public domain work or borrowing from a creative commons work, sticking it in their own work and going, I'll fix it later. But also, being somewhat forgetful, they did it more than once. In fact, they did it three times at a minimum because they did it for SCP-2454, which has been deleted. They did it for SCP-2510, which is probably going to be deleted. And they did it for their 5K contest entry, which has also been deleted. Now plagiarism is always wrong. And if you have a propensity, if you have a habit of forgetting that you've included public domain works in your thing and not crediting them properly, which could happen to people. If somebody pointed out to me that I had forgotten to credit something, I would probably scour my works as much as I possibly could to figure out and be really worried about writing new things. It would be on my mind at all times when writing. But at the same time, you can't, truthfully, attribute a malicious motive to someone like that. Because you don't know what's in their head. You don't know why they did those things. Again, there are reasonable explanations that are still punishable, still deserve a ban, but don't make them a bad person, right? This makes them incredibly negligent, to be honest with you. That's the thing. And people can go to jail for negligent homicide just as well as they can for a manslaughter charge. So, I mean, negligence doesn't make the core crime any less severe. It just makes it excusable from more of a moral standpoint. And the only reason I bring this up is because the SCP Wiki staff and a few other people off-site as well have been, like, really demonizing metaphysition. Now, I agree that metaphysition should be banned forever. They have proven, without a shadow of a doubt, they cannot correct this themselves. And if they can't correct it themselves, then they're always going to be this negligent. I'm sorry. That's it. But I'm going to give metaphysition. I was going to have a voice chat with the metaphysition, but they weren't really able to do that. And plus, this is this kind of thing that's, you know, it's emotionally charged for obvious reasons for someone who's been on the SCP Wiki as long as they have contributed as much as they have. And to see that some of it's going to be deleted, some and their reputation has been completely run into the dirt. There's nothing I can say to fix that either, by the way. I can tell you that there are excuses that at least make it less morally objectionable while still being a banable offense. But that doesn't change the fact that most people are going to say so-and-so is banned for plagiarism and shrink away from them like. So, I mean, but I decided, I asked them if I could speak to them in voice chat. They said they weren't able to do that, which was, you know, understandable. But they gave me a fairly long explanation of their thought process and what happened that got them in trouble in the first place from their perspective. And I feel like that's important to make sure that it gets out there. So, I can't do voice chat, and I'd rather put this behind me, but I will explain my reasoning. The recent issue was a mistake on my part. This is about the 5K entry. I have chronic health issues, including memory loss, and sometimes I completely zone out. I had initially copied and pasted from Wikipedia so I could get the chronology of events right for what was entirely superlative, and I only added to give readers real historical context. I intended to rewrite it all just using the initial text as a guide, but somehow ended up with a paragraph or two that were unaltered. I admit my life has been hell lately, and I was in a rush to get it done in time for the contest. I slip up with things like this constantly, something that people who know me are well aware of. There was no intention to be deceptive or to steal none of my narratives have ever been stolen. However, apparently they decided to use another incident where it was decided by staff members at that time. Where it was decided by staff members at that time, several years ago, that it did not meet the technical definition of plagiarism. That was part of my efforts to use real gnostic scripture from 2000 years ago, and weave them into my own mecanite and sarkic writing, with the goal of implying that two fictional religious traditions and one historical tradition were connected and shared a common ancestry somehow. Frustratingly, I was always open about that, about my intentions, and old staff that aren't around anymore were aware of that. I'm not entirely sure that's fair to say. This is an interesting thing, because I can give them their platform, but also being involved in this situation. I have knowledge of how that went down, and there was a huge amount of argument back and forth between a lot of staff, and basically two administrators changed in a fiat sort of way, just said, we're going to do it this way, and that's all I have to say about it. We'll get back to it, though. And old staff that aren't around anymore were aware of that. Those staff are still around, actually. You can actually contact them. They're still in contact with staff today. I didn't think I had decided, because other writers use old scripture all the time without having to source it. Sort of true, sort of not true. It's complex. Like, if you include a Bible quote, most people would consider that to be a fun, this is the problem, right? If you include a piece of quote from a piece of fiction that everyone knows, or that most people know, like the Bible, or the Quran, or some non-Abrahamic holy book, which I can't think of any right now, because apparently I am super white. Anyway, but something that is so common as to be understood and widely accepted as common knowledge, no matter how vague and obscure your reference, you can get away with it because you can literally say this is just an Easter egg. This is a tiny little line, one line that I'm throwing in for, you know, effect, but back to it. I figured that as a literary website, we use the literary definition of plagiarism, which is different from academic, which for some reason is what staff want to use, on a site that, again, is not remotely academic. Yes and no. We use a more academic sense of plagiarism, that's true, but literary plagiarism is still about the same thing, claiming that what is, claiming that stuff is yours. And it's, to be fair, the phrasing that was used was I was inspired by these works, not I use these works as a reference, or I included parts of these works, I was inspired by these works. So let's be clear about that. I mean, I'm not, I'm not gonna, I would not like to say that I'm impugning this person's motives, I'm just making sure that we're clear about the facts here. So even though it was determined to not technically be plagiarism, those who disagreed with that position, like myself, who aren't in staff anymore, who are now in charge of the site, which I don't think that's true, I'm sorry, decided to retroactively use it against me to justify banning me, still angry it seems, that I had somehow gotten away with something. I think there's probably a kernel of truth to that? But by and large, I don't think that's really what it is. It's a matter of, if you did it in the past, regardless of if it was at the time your intentions were important, we decided your intentions mattered and you didn't intend to steal. This time around, same thing. We don't know if you intended to or not, but if you're negligent twice in a row, one has to make certain assumptions about it. And like I had said, I'd always been open about this shit, always. I didn't include citations because I wanted those pieces of scripture to be like Easter eggs for the reader. I didn't want to spoil it and was literally hoping for people to make the connection, the complete opposite of someone trying to present something as their own writing. Now I'm going to read the next part, which is less about facts and more about opinion on this person's part, so I'm not going to respond to any of it. I'm just going to read it straight out. I'm not endorsing it. I am simply saying what this person said to me. But that doesn't matter to the majority of staff today. So after six years of giving everything I could to the site, they banned me. This isn't what bothers me most though. What really makes me livid is how they have decided to misrepresent me, claiming that my intentions were to lie and deceive. That is a disgusting fabrication and rogid, and others should be ashamed of peddling it. My life is already hell enough. I've been banned from a site I love. If this is all by the books, they don't have to actively lie about my motivations. It is utterly pathetic. They are free to ban me for an accident, for my ignorance and forgetfulness, but how dare they lie about my reasons? Seriously, if I was trying to get away with something, I'd think I would do a better job. I'm trying to move on in my writing. I'm glad that my fans have stayed with me. A lot of my so-called peers have abandoned me. Plenty more have offered their emotional support. I've never been good with the more bureaucratic parts of the website, and it would have been nice if they just offered me a chance to correct what was clearly a mistake. There's more, but I was asked to keep that part off the record, so I'm going to. As I said, this is a particularly important issue on the SCP Wiki, and I hope, I honestly do hope that one day plagiarism on the SCP Wiki is treated the way it's supposed to be treated. There's that image plagiarism, which is plagiarism. It is is treated similarly. I don't understand, and they're going back now to try and the moots is the example I use because it was something that we resolved. There was clear plagiarism involved, but it involved text. Again, that's the distinction on the SCP Wiki. Plagiarism of images? It's not okay, but it's accepted as a cost of doing business, I guess. By the way, there's a difference. If somebody put up the SCP-173 and said, I found this image here, it belongs to so-and-so, it's not mine, or even just this isn't my image, I found it on the internet. That's good enough to avoid a plagiarism problem. It's not enough to avoid a copyright problem. Again, we mentioned the differences between those two. But on SCP-173, that's not what happened. On SCP, you can go down the list, there's a lot of SCPs where that's not true, and instead of fixing it by getting rid of the articles, they just removed the images, or they're going to remove the images, or in the SCP-173's case, they asked for permission afterwards and got permission and continued to use the plagiarized image. That is actually oddly enough their argument against keeping the mutes, because we asked for permission afterwards. That's exactly what you did with 173. Sorry, it's just the truth. And I don't know. I think the mutes probably should have gone, but I think that the plagiarized party, in this case, should have had a say in it, and they did, and their say was, link to my book and I'll excuse it, and I'm like, cool, that's what we did. So going back to revisit it seems folly, especially if you want to avoid getting in trouble with the original person who was plagiarized. Either way, I've said a lot today. 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