Important - A Reminder About Plagiarism

Hey CTzens!

Over the past couple of months, we have noticed an increase in the number of high-quality, user-generated blog posts in the community. We really enjoy reading them; and we encourage you all to keep up your good, original work!

However, we have also noticed an increase in the number of articles that have been plagiarized from other websites. Plagiarism is the act of taking somebody else’s work without their permission and passing it off as their own.

Unfortunately, this is not a rare occurrence on Car Throttle. Over the past couple of weeks, we have received a large number of emails from professionals who claimed (and prove) that their articles had been plagiarized by a small number of particular CTzens. These users weren’t just taking quotes out of articles without permission—these incidents actually involved copying and pasting all of the text without attributing the original author.

Plagiarism is a really big problem because it is no different from stealing someone else’s property. The car community has a vast number of journalists and bloggers (including the staff at Car Throttle) who depend on writing these articles to make a living. Plagiarism really hurts these professionals. And, just like property theft, plagiarism can get you in trouble with the law.

Any posts determined to be plagiarized will be deleted, and you will be given a warning by our moderators. In severe cases, repeat offenders will be banned

Here are a number of steps that you can take to avoid plagiarism:

1. Don’t copy and paste articles from other websites on the Internet. This is a severe form of plagiarism.

2. If you want to use images from other articles/sources on the Internet, make sure you give credit to the original owner (unless the image is copyright-free). You can attribute the image source by listing the name of the publisher or the URL that the picture came from (e.g. Source: www.carthrottle.com)

3. It’s always a good idea to include links to the websites you used to get your information from! Check the Formatting Guide for information on how to insert website links into your text!

4. If you decide to take a quote from someone else, make sure you give them credit! (e.g. According to Kyle Ashdown, “Mia has much less body rust than Phil.”)

Thanks for taking the time to read this important post! The staff are very proud of user-generated content here at Car Throttle, and we will do our best to support quality, original work made by CTzens!