This should be common sense; taking thoughts, ideas, or words and presenting them as your own is wrong.

Some prominent examples of abhorrent blogging behavior:

• Copy-pasting text into your story without attribution is plagiarism
• Paraphrasing someone else’s words into your story without attribution is plagiarism
• Copying someone’s story structure without attribution is plagiarism (and lazy)
• Copying someone’s code with attribution is plagiarism

Nothing new to add here. Stealing is stealing, and it doesn’t matter what excuses you have.

Examples

Here is text from a real story someone submitted to HackerNoon:

Here is where the fake writer stole it from:

The writer copy-pasted text, and changed one or two words, not citing CNBC at all.

In case you were wondering: yes, this is plagiarism. Changing one word does not make you the writer of this text.

No Such Thing As “Accidental” Plagiarism

“Accidentally” copying someone’s text and forgetting to add your source is still plagiarism, even if you didn’t mean to do it.

Writers have a duty to edit their stories and this is your responsibility.

In universities, you’d be expelled for plagiarism.

In the real world, you would be sued.

At HackerNoon, you will be banned.

Needless to say (but incredibly it’s come up in the past), if your story has been verified to have plagiarized other work, even ‘accidentally’, we will not accept that piece for resubmission even after you make changes.

Editing Protocol Index:

1. Editing Protocol Overview

   1. Second Human Rule

      1. Verified Writers

   2. Time to Review

2. Standards of Quality

   1. Originality Score
   2. 6 Ws Score
   3. Objectivity in ranked listicles
   4. Unranked listicles
   5. Actionable advice

3. Red Flags

   1. Subject Matter

      1. Subject matter saturation

   2. Plagiarism

   3. Sources and Citations

   4. Formatting is bad or broken

   5. Grammar level: gibberish

   6. Story is Too Short

4. Backlink Rules & Guidelines

   1. Backlink Limits

   2. Backlink quality and diversity

      1. Diversity of sources
      2. Internal linking
      3. Changing links

   3. Reposting and Canonical Linking

      1. Canonical links to company domain
      2. Canonical links to blog networks or social networks