Dear Paul, redux

1. 84

   Isabella Snowposted 16 years ago

   Well not really, just the title is a redux.
   
   I know Ive asked before and you said that hubpages wont penalize hubbers who copy and paste their text - but I'm curious as to how the system does it on its own.
   
   If you can penalize a hub score automatically for duplicate content, why cant you do it when someone cuts and pastes from another site?
   
   Before youd said it was because it cant be proven that its copied - but then that seems to conflict with the automatic flagging of hubs for duplicate content.
   
   Could you please explain this process in detail for me, cos it's really annoying to see how many hubbers scores keep climbing with nothing but copied text. Even if they have permission, its still duplicate content. Really, really obvious duplicate content.
   
   And the down votes are useless because people dont realize the hubs are copied and pasted, so they wont get voted down.

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2. STAFF

   pauldeedsposted 16 years ago

   We have an automated process that checks whether a hub is duplicated.  Every single hub of sufficient length is checked soon after it is published.  Older hubs, and hubs that have been modified are periodically retested.   The more duplication we find, the larger the penalty that is applied to hub score.  The detection process is certainly not flawless.  There are probably more errors where we don't identify something as a duplicate that is, than the other way around.  That is intentional.  Accusing someone that hasn't copied content of copying tends to alienate the users we least want to offend.  However, if we only catch every other copied hub, we'll still be doing a pretty good job of identifying and punishing those that copy content (because they don't tend to just do it once).
   
   That's about all there is to it.  I suppose it would be useful to allow users to flag stuff that they think is duplicated from somewhere, so that we can pass it through the checker again, and perhaps with a higher level of scrutiny.  That may be something we'll add at some point in the future.  In the mean time if you would like to privately point out users or hubs with a high hubscore that you think have built their reputations by duplicating their content from elsewhere, feel free to send them to me privately (preferably in batches).

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3. 84

   Isabella Snowposted 16 years ago

   I dont think any of the top hubbers are copying and pasting. But I see a lot of prodigies climbing with nothing but copied stuff. The slick ones copy a paragraph each from from different sites.
   
   Im not one of the people who have recently been accusing people of plagiarism and Im not talking about copying content from places like squidoo or wherever.
   
   Im talking about copying from the mayo clinic, ffs!
   
   Ill send you some links to hubs when I have a 'batch".
   
   No time for that today... but I do think it would be nice to be able to flag for duplicate content so a penalty can be assigned and I can stop reading "wow, you're so clever, this hub is amazing!"
   
   Cos yeah, when its written by a real physicist or summat, its going to be amazing!
   
   Thanks for explaining.

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