wonder why Eps has never thought of this... | |
When you are reading reviews, and you smell a turd in the salad bowl in terms of plagiarism, what do you do?
You probably grab a fairly unique charstring out of the text, say a sentence or so, and Google the sucker in "quotes". I do. If it finds a perfect match, the review's probably plagiarized--and you can easily check.
So, if Eps is so concerned about unique content, why not do the following: as part of the 'preview your review' stage of posting, have its own system grab a random 80-char text string from the review text and Google it to see if it gets any hits. If it does, pick a second and a third, or even a fourth and a fifth.
There is no need or reason to announce the fact or the methodology to the poster, or in public at all. Let them post as they will. Sorry, but if you're plagiarizing, you don't deserve an opportunity to deplagiarize by making a few little changes here and there.
(Obligatory personal aside: in general, I'd prefer to set nasty traps for a criminal rather than issue them a nice warning, on the general principle that if they are truly the enemy, there is no reason to give them a nicey-nice chance to avoid pain. I'm the sort of person who, if he could get by with it, would have all sorts of disappointing surprises for burglars. You coach your own team's players, not the other team's.)
There are a lot of ways to use this information. Probably the least labour-intensive for everyone is to have a 'content uniqueness' flag at the top of every posted review, consisting of three stars. Since the occasional quote has to be ok, and since a string can be duplicated by accident without fault, let's say that everyone starts with three stars. One Google dupe string does nothing. Two takes away a star. Four takes away the second star. Five takes away the third.
The world sees the new review, and voilą, it's labeled as being partly or wholly plagiarized. Yet the words 'content uniqueness' weasel out of actually saying the ugly word itself. "No one at Epinions has accused you of plagiarism. We simply determined that your content was most probably not unique. Well, it wasn't. Write unique content in the future, and stop your whimpering."
In that way, anyone reading the review doesn't have to do Epinions' goddamned legwork in the usual labourious method to vet the review for plagiarism. Anything with three stars intact can be pretty reliably assumed to be unique, and the rater can stop copying and pasting stuff into Google and get to the business of reading, rating and commenting. Anything with less than three stars would raise a warning flag. Anything with no stars would be fair game for an automatic NH without even having to bother to read it all. (When you believe a review to be plagiarized, do you read the whole thing? I sure don't. I NH it and move on.) Some would dish it out for one star. Some would do some Googling to check first. Their call.
Ok, now let's say the poster of the review saw it and panicked. They want to get rid of the flag, and they're at least smart enough to know there is no point emailing Nirav and claiming "pity me, for I am wronged". They cannot know which part of their plagiarism set off the flags. The only thing for it is to edit the review and make the content unique. Imagine their reaction when they change 2-3 sentences and find that they've now only got one star!
What's more, three posted reviews receiving no stars at all could be an automatic ticket.
Which brings up a question. Why isn't the fact that a reviewer has been ticketed displayed somehow with their reviews? Why not just put a thick red border around their profile picture (or the emoticon thing)? If someone's posting duplicate reviews, and has had their peepee whacked over it, I don't want to bungle across them on Just In and, like a dufe, rate their review without checking for that possibility. I also don't want to check every review for that possibility myself.
What would be truly funny is if prominent reviewers who regularly swipe portions of their reviews off manufacturer's websites started seeing their stuff show up with only two stars' worth of content uniqueness. Oh, the shame. It could even lead to a mad scramble through their existing work to clean up all the plagiarism they'd been getting by with for months or even years.
(I'm not, of course, suggesting that there has ever been anyone in this category. Surely not. Only rank newbies would do such a thing, clearly, for all prominent Eps reviewers are Good Epiniocitizens. But if there were such folks, it would be pretty amusing watching them go batso burying their past crimes in shallow graves. Theoretically.)
jkk | 
When Poe ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
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