<p>I understand the need to handle wikipedia carefully as a source, since it isn’t a fixed product, and since at any particular point it can be dead on for 100 issues and dead wrong for another 100. But using wikipedia as part of a discussion, with full disclosure, simply cannot be considered plagiarism. I think there’s a huge difference between the offense of plagiarism and the offense of violating your teacher’s censorship policies about sources. And combining the two works only to undermine the plagiarism prohibition.</p>
<p>Ditto for citation form errors. In my world, it would be next to impossible to have “unintended plagiarism”, and I am stunned to learn that Dartmouth mashes real plagiarism together with nondeceptive citation errors. I suppose this is teaching me why young people don’t seem to take plagiarism seriously as an offense – because their elders have trivialized the term and turned it from a serious moral failing to a symbol of authoritarian arbitrariness.</p>