Talk:Plagiarism/@comment-94.75.73.228-20110226101303

Sorry people, but are you SURE that fragments were copied from the sources? I am not. I have checked at least online sources and I found that it is somehow similar but not equal.

First thing is that many of you have anti-Gaddafi attitude, which is right, but in the same time you probably may judge the thesis by your emtions. I am not muslim or any way involved in problems of this societies (I am Slavic, Christian, from East-Central Europe), but, let's be honest, one thing is to be a bad guy and the other to be a scientist, ie. bad guy =/= bad scientist; Bad guy == bad guy; scientist == a one who has proved to be able to conduct scientific research. You can be a mad scientist but you are still scientist.

Second thing is English language. As far as what I have been able to read from the sources posted, it is not ctrl+c ctrl+v. And as far as I know languages (I am a linguist) there is a big chance of writing similar sentence to some other sentence form a different source. Especially in the language which is internationally used. It is simply that types of writting and patterns of thinking are limited and at some point they corss each other. We would have to thing and write in totally different languages and patterns of thinking to achive full dissimilarity. What I am trying to point out is that I can take an thesis of almost any world known scientist and prove it to be a plagiat simiply because I find a similiar sentence in some other work from xx milions available - it is pure statistics, eg. Is Samuel Phillips Huntington plagiarist of Feliks Koneczny? Polish people think he might be, and if I would think the same way as You, I would state he is surely is a plagiarist. (See Robert Piotrowski's comparative analysis in: Robert Piotrowski, 'Problem filozoficzny ładu społecznego a porównawcza nauka o cywilizacjach'. Dialog, Warsaw 2003, p. 192-205, ISBN 83-88938-41-X)

I am not saying that Gaddafi is not plagiarist but what I want to express is that we should think about what we judge and how we judge it. We can find ourselves in a position where one cannot write anything simply because there will be always a possibility to find a publication which contains sentences which are so similiar that can be judged as a plagiat. Language is limited and especially English language in which xx milions of people express themselves through out the world. And science simply shouldn't be used as a political tool.