Today’s New York Times has a piece about students who don’t know that they should, according to university standards and custom, credit Wikipedia for quoted paragraphs even though Wikipedia is a group written source. The piece ends with more conventional cases of students who simply, in order to get their degree and get on with life, use papers written by others– old fashioned plagiarism and paper buying.
But much more interesting to me is the first group, the ones accustomed to “saving” images off the web (I do this) and to downloading music and movies– a whole host of materials from the web that we consider fair game for fair use.
The piece suggests that young people raised in this world, themselves perhaps participants in the great group writing project of Wikipedia, really see quotation from sources in a different way from a previous generation with perhaps a different view of self and individuality.
Tags: copyright, fair use, New York Times, plagiarism, wikipedia