Plagiarism: This is such a stupid thing to do.

The fact that people are doing this stupid thing makes me look for systems that make doing such a stupid thing easy. So I am swinging around to thinking that there are now a lot of people who copy paragraphs from Wikipedia and elsewhere, drop them into their documents, thinking "I will go back and deal with this later".

And if they fail to include the quotation marks when they copy-&-paste, or if they are overwhelmed, trying to get the document out…:

Josh Barro: Universities Are Not on the Level: ‘Keith Boykin… wants to see analyses of other college presidents’ writings to see if they plagiarized too…. My guess is this sort of copying is not that common, precisely because academics know it’s so easy to catch if you go looking for it…. What I do think there’s a lot of out there, undetected, is data fraud of the sort we’ve seen in the Hauser and Gino cases... <joshbarro.com/p/universities-are-not-on…>