Copying and Pasting entire articles

[roddy]

Any comments on the copying and pasting of entire articles? Personallly I find it annoying and unnecessary, especially when there is no attached comment, just a 'read this'. As someone said recently, we're quite capable of finding stuff to read ourselves - this might be a place to discuss the news, and there are already plenty of places available to read it.

Roddy

[xuechengfeng]

I don't see why it would be necessary to post an entire article, unless the website you are trying to access requires a subscription.

[Pravit]

I especially hate it when cranks post articles several pages long and then get upset when nobody takes them seriously. This is an occasional problem on another phpBB forum I frequent; I think one time the record for "longest copy-and-paste article" was set there by some crank. As you might expect, someone invariably had to quote the entire thing and add a one-line response

[roddy]

I don’t mind if the cranks are writing their own articles. We had one a while back who got laughed at and then removed his article, leaving a note that ‘this forum is not worth the trouble’ or similar. He’d also pasted it on another site of mine, and I wound up getting legal threats as a result – empty ones, I think, but I wasn’t going to argue the point in this case.

[roddy]

BUMP for this one - more and more articles are being pasted in completely, sometimes without a source or comment - if anyone wants to make a case for this being useful, go ahead, but until then I'd prefer you didn't do it.

Roddy

[gato]

There's the issue of the great Chinese firewall, which may certain news sites unavailable to some users. That's why I've sometimes copied large selections of articles from Taiwan papers (making sure they're not too sensitive to get you into trouble). I don't know what you think of that.

By the way, does accessing the articles through popjisyo.com get you over the great wall?

[roddy]

If something’s inaccessible from China, that’s no problem – although I would much prefer to see quoting of the most relevant parts than just the entire thing – if the paster can’t be bothered picking out the pertinent bits, why should anyone else? Particularly true I think when you bear in mind that whichever language the article is in, it’ll be a foreign one for a number of people reading the topic.

I would think popsiyo and similar sites should act as a way of sneaking round the blocks, yes.

[wix]

the most important thing is that articles should not be posted without some sort of intelligent comment or question.

Also I don't like the full length of articles being posted. There are also copyright issues associated with doing this. I don't like people just posting links either.

I suggest that anyone who post articles should make a brief summary of the article or include a short quote plus a link and/or more details of the source. This should be followed by some sort of comment or question.

[roddy]

From the very depths of the archives . . .

There are two kinds of posts (well hundreds, but only two for today ) which annoy me.

One: Here is a link. Read it. It's interesting.

Well, very good. But if you've read it, why not tell us what it's actually about, so we can decide if we want to read it or not. Perhaps a selected quote or two would help. You can't think of anything to say? Not sure which part of the article is interesting? Well maybe it isn't so interesting.

Two: Here is an article I copied and pasted from somewhere else on the internet. Read it. It's interesting.

Well, equally good. But the thing about the Internet is that you can get from one place to another pretty easily. A link would do in 99% of cases - see above. There's no need to dump huge chunks of unasked for text on people's monitors. In the unlikely event that a site is blocked from China and the eager reader has no idea how to read a proxy, they'll ask for it to be copied and pasted in, no doubt.

Basically, I think everyone has access to their favored news sites, Google news, news aggregators, RSS feeds, etc, etc. The chances of anyone who is interested missing something vital is slim, and if an article is worth bringing to people's attention it's worth doing so in a way that will stimulate a bit of interest and discussion - pick out the relevant parts, give a bit of personal reaction, comment, disagreement.

This seems to be happening more recently, hence this post. It's not a major issue, and I'm not going to chuck anyone out over it or anything (well, there was one guy who tried to paste the entire Chinese language Internet into the Reading forum once on the basis that 'people can read it', but he was a one off), but this is at heart a discussion forum, not a things-to-read-and-links-to-other-places-forum.

Apologies if that seemed a little sarcastic, it's a bit of a pet peeve, but also a fairly reasonable request I think.

[Koneko]

Two points taken.

Two steps towards perfectionism (fastidiousness?)

K.

[roddy]

Now, onto my third point, the banning of cute cat avatars

PS That was a joke

[trevelyan]

Nooooooooooo!

miao <*smack*>