Russian Website Plagiarism?
I was doing some more research on the Kanrin Maru today. It looks a chance I may be able to get some support for building a model of the ship for a museum in the area. It’s still up in the air and may not happen, but that’s for another discussion.
Today, I was trying to recall certain details of the kit manufactured by Woody Joe. Rather than dig through my notes, I decided to poke around on the Internet. I just happen to run across what appeared to be a kit review… in Russian. It was all in another language, yet something looked REALLY familiar about it. Somehow, it reminded me in overall appearance like something I would have done, only it was in Russian and the photos were clearly not mine. But, the composition of the photos and choice of photos seemed oddly familiar.
Enter Bing Translator, or Google Translator if you prefer. I started going over the translated text. It was definitely different that anything I’d written… sort of. I mean, it talked about how Woody Joe kits weren’t directly marketed to the Russian market and how Russian ship modelers were familiar with Western ship modeling and this was something new and different.
As I went through the article, I realized that it was essentially an article I’d written last year. I had to dig up a copy of the article since I couldn’t be sure at first, but when I pulled it up and read translations, it was clear the Russian website completely plagiarized the work I did for Ships in Scale. It was amazing to me that anyone would do that. It’s just beyond my realm of thinking.
Clearly, the “writer” – wait, does a plagiarist qualify to be referred to as a writer? Perhaps he should be called… well, it doesn’t really matter what he’s called. He did bother to change some of the work to fit his needs and he did emphasize different information on the ship in their kit review, but it was clearly a copy job.
I guess that’s a good sign that my writing and organization is acceptable, if someone likes it enough to use as the core of their own article.
And, it doesn’t make me mad all, it just really surprises me to see that someone would do that. Anyway, I got paid for my article, so what do I care?
If you’re interested, you can check it out here:
http://www.shipmodeling.ru/content/news/woody_joe_ship
I actually love that the author even went so far as to copy the general composition of the photo of my finger pointing through a page of Japanese instructions.
I can’t wait to see my next work in Russian!
Ship Modeler 