Shameless, Gory, but Still with Professional Integrity

Saturday should be restful and uncomplicated and gracious. But no, not this Saturday. Drama ensued.

I am hired to work as a text editor for this new Indonesian Internet magazine with a small team of five boys and another girl. The three-month agreement was for me to proofread and enhance messy original English articles from the other writers. And guess what? What I received in my inbox today were links to articles and wholly copy-pasted pieces from another person's blog. WHOAAA. Talk about plagiarism.

Shocked and appalled, I intended to quit the job that early afternoon. That's deliberate plagiarism: everything that is against my professional and personal integrity. I told all my students that plagiarism is brainless. It will only destroy their creativity. Too lazy to write and work, unwilling to put real efforts into shaping newly invented ideas. No originality!

One of them called me to ask when I could finish all the editing duties for those eight plagiarized items. I vowed I would never do it. He was upset and hung up immediately. So, I called another person to tell him I was about to decline the job. Stealing others' works is not my style. But he said he would fix the problem and would call me later. He didn't call.

What I discovered next in my email were two new articles. This is how they did it: They quoted lines from two Indonesian texts and drafted them into a shorter English piece. With links to the original publications.

Hm. Still not satisfactory. But I did edit one passage, modifying redundancy and insignificant ideas and lame grammar, and at the end I added the rightful author names and access dates of when the sources were retrieved. I emailed my work to four people and demanded that they include the author names and access dates on their website. If they refuse to do so, I can always quit. I'm not doing anything that my conscience will never approve.

Has any of them responded to my mail and proofreading? NO. What tardy, unpunctual snails. The least they could do is to reply me instantly. So disrespectful. I haven't seen anything admirable from them. Looks like I'm quitting after a day of their shambolic coordination. Yeah. Good job.

Saturday, February 25, 2012, 7:15 PM

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