Ellis Hughes - Copying Text from Other Sources

Started by Pamela D Lloyd on Sunday, July 31, 2016
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7/31/2016 at 4:08 PM

I've noticed that the biography for Ellis Hughes, as it stands today, contains a lot of text that directly copies material from another website, http://www.hughescentral.com/300years.html, which seems to be the original source of the text, although I'm not certain of that as the text has been copied to a number of different websites.

Unfortunately, whoever last updated the profile may have unintentionally plagiarized the material. As a rule of thumb, text in the Overview section should, as much as possible, be your own words, should rely on primary sources, and should cite the source of the information if you don't have direct knowledge of the events.

8/1/2016 at 10:37 AM

@Ellis Hughes Bio - It would be helpful if you copied or linked the Bio entry that you are referring to. This would enable the person who placed the purported plagiarized entry to recognize the error or dispute the claim. For example, I added a text from a tombstone (in quotations and referenced) but this may, or may not, be what you are citing.
Thank you,
W.R.Lee

8/7/2016 at 5:01 PM

The website from which much of the text in Ellis Hughes' biography was copied is, "300 Years in America | Hughes Central," which is located at http://www.hughescentral.com/300years.html, as noted in my first post.

Ellis Hughes' biography starts with the lines: "Ellis was born in Wales in 1687 and was either 12 or 13 years old when he traveled with his family on the Robert and Elizabeth to Pennsylvania. Ellis was John Hugh's third child, following Jane (1683) and Rowland (1685)."

The section, "Ellis: Generation Two, Immigrant," on the Hughes website has the text: "Ellis was born in Wales in 1687 and was either 12 or 13 years old when he traveled with his family on the Robert and Elizabeth to Pennsylvania. Ellis was John Hugh's third child, following Jane (1683) and Rowland (1685)."

It's actually quite easy to discover when text has been copied from internet sources. You can copy text from Ellis' biography and then paste it into a search engine, which will return a list of websites with similar text. Alternatively, you can use one of many online plagiarism checkers. I plugged the text into PlagTracker; you can see the results at https://www.plagtracker.com/report/be40cf995c852497a250f99317374500/

8/7/2016 at 5:06 PM

On rereading your post, William, I realize that I answered the wrong question. The bio entry I'm referring to is listed in the column to the left of the discussion text, under Profiles Mentioned.

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