Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Website launched to help expose online plagiarism

With advances in technology just about anyone can say he or she is a journalist and post a story online. They can also steal the work of others and claim it as their own, knowing it's highly unlikely the original writer will ever discover the plagiarism. The Sunlight Foundation, a group that uses the Internet to promote a more open government and provide new sources for news media, hopes to change that with its new website, Churnalism, a source "to help detect possible plagiarism in news and research articles online," according to a press release from the organization.

Using a database of press releases and Wikipedia entries, the site "matches fragments of text between two documents," states the press release. Users can run the system "automatically, or you can manually paste in the URL or text of an article," and if it finds a match, "shows you a side-by-side result right on your computer screen." Visit the site here.

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