ps. I write this as someone who hasn't had a problem with students sourcing facts from Wikipedia.
This turn of phrase could be interpreted in at least two ways: 1. Your students regularly use Wikipedia to discover facts, and cite Wikipedia in the process, and you don't consider this a bad thing. 2. Your students have not cited Wikipedia. (Though I would be shocked if they were not *using* it.) Generally, none of us are expected to cite "common knowledge" as it is represented in dictionaries and encyclopedias. Of course, if this were truly knowledge held in common, we would have need of neither. The question is whether text that you re-use verbatim should always be attributed. I have always considered this to be the case, but was in a discussion with colleagues about IRB applications and some of the proforma text that frequently goes into creating them. Those who would never find cutting-and-pasting acceptable in an article are fine with cutting and pasting "boilerplate" in the form of consent forms or other materials that are common across similar protocols, and would never think to cite it. At first I was surprised by this, but at some level, we consider that kind of writing to be "technology." Much in the same way as we might copy computer code from a cookbook without attributing it, we take something that "works" for a human subjects protocol. Often, the boilerplate language is provided to us by our IRBs so that we can do just that. My partner indicates that this kind of copy-and-pasting from boilerplate is not at all unusual in the legal profession, and I suspect it happens in other places where the sort of "ultimate wording" already has been reached. I am far from an apologist for plagiarism (despite what I may have suggested elsewhere: http://alex.halavais.net/how-to-cheat-good) but it seems that given the common undergraduate experience, finding the words that work within a formal--almost legalistic--structure is not exactly an unexpected response. I'm not saying we should blame ourselves, as faculty, for student plagiarism--and I have little patience for those who claim that their questions are so original that they never have to worry about plagiarism--but I can at least see a corner there of why students think this is acceptable. For too many of them, school is not about communicating unique ideas, but rather crossing off a very clearly defined objective in order to achieve an acceptable grade. Best, Alex -- // // This email is // [x] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded. // [ ] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing. // // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur // http://alex.halavais.net //