Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-1713281-20140515085613/@comment-61371-20140605015119

I think you make a lot of good points, but "if they added plagiarized material 100 times and never read our policies or were caught, is it really their fault"? Yes. Because they did it. It's like stealing from a store and claiming you didn't know the store policy forbade stealing. Stealing is a fairly universal no-no. Plagiarism is theft, pure and simple. Pleading ignorance should never excuse it. Having said that, I'm not saying we shouldn't warn people on their first offense. I'm not saying we should immediately jump to permanently banning people for plagiarism (though I REALLY want to). We've had plenty of people who, after one warning, turned things around and became valuable contributors (or at least they stopped plagiarizing. Which is good enough). I fully support a "warn first, ban later" policy.

And Nate's 100% right: With older material, you DO have to be careful about who stole from who. Don't automatically assume the contributor here was in the wrong. I think I said this before, but if you can check the history of the other site (if it's Wikipedia, for instance), do so. I know I've seen stuff taken from us and posted elsewhere. Having said that, though, it's a fairly safe bet that if the text is from a Handbook, we're the ones who stole it. Just because when the Handbooks were being released, none of our profiles were as good as theirs (at least not a one-to-one comparison, i.e. their Spider-Man profile to ours. though our Dennis Sykes (Earth-616) page was just as good, if not better, than the profile they eventually did on him. I credit the guy who made that page and did most of the edits. He is truly a genius).