What is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism, as we all know, is taking the work of someone else and submitting it as your own work. Copying pages from an encyclopaedia or a novel and presenting it as your own writing is obviously plagiarism and none of us would consider it for a moment. But what about websites?

Perhaps the most-often plagiarized works on the web are "links" sites -- sites such as "Yahoo," or "The Linguistic Funland TESL". Sites such as these collect links to relevant resources, including short descriptions of the sites. Many people see nothing wrong with copying the information from these pages wholesale, and pasting them into their own "links" site without giving credit to the original site or its creator. It can be quite frustrating for the creators of such sites to see their work taken in this way, since they often have put hundreds, if not thousands, of hours into describing the sites and setting up their pages.