I posted an answer here

and IIRC received one or two upvotes.

Then a user falsely accused me of copy-pasting from Wikipedia without citing my sources.

To that accusation I replied here.

However, now my answer is at -3 votes, apparently because of that false accusation.

I guess that this is also due to the fact that comments in threads don't show up and only the title does (which in that case is extremely prejudicing). So the people likely see the thread title and downvote without further examination.

Now, I understand that up/downvotes are a matter of personal opinions. But that answer really doesn't deserve downvotes. But that's not the point.

The point is, a false accusation has been raised and the result is that. It is not really something that induce me to contribute more to the site. Not just because it hurts my rep points but because it hurts my real reputation, since I post under my real name.

Note that I am an active and high-rep user (20k+) on ElectricalEngineering SE and I've posted quite a lot there. Whoever wants to check can see that I'm fairly thorough in my citations.

Moreover, having worked in academia in my distant past, I know very well what it means to cite other people's work.

EDIT

(To clarify things and address the feedback I had in answers and comments)

First of all thanks to CD staff and mods for handling this. Now the problem is solved.

I still have to learn how to use the interface and I find the whole threaded comments a bit confusing. It is more flexible than the SE comments and potentially useful, but I find a bit difficult to follow the various combinations. Maybe it's an interface thing. We'll see.

Anyway, that to explain why I had some difficulties in getting the "workflow" right and why maybe my complaints seemed a bit off (I scattered the information a bit, and I noticed only later that a comment could be flagged, but the "flag box" was tiny, so I didn't know if I had to explain things better somewhere else).

Now to the point: although I mildly complained about downvotes in this meta post, because it seemed to me they were prompted by the comment I was pissed off for, I really didn't care too much about that. The mods explained that they were cast before that comment, so it's ok.

As I explained better in some other comment, the BIG problem was the unwarranted accusation of me having copy-pasted material from Wikipedia without citing the source.

I can understand that for many people outside professional R&D business or Academia plagiarism may not seem such a big deal or may seem "only" a copyright infringement issue.

However, everyone in the field knows how bad such a behavior is (people have been thrown out of PhD programs or had their degree nullified for such things - even a former German minister of defense, who had to resign). Hence my heated reaction about the unwarranted accusation.

It's a matter of reputation. REAL life reputation, since I post under my real name (and I take pride in that). Although there are some good reasons to post under a nickname on the Internet, I think in a network like CoDidact, which strives for quality content, accountability is paramount.

Although I haven't been working in Academia for ages, I still have friends there and that accusation still makes me cringe. Moreover, I work as a teacher and it still looks terrible if a teacher appears to be cheating.

Hence my primary goal was to have that comment removed from my answer, although it might have not been so explicit in this post (I clarified that in the flag and in other comments).

posted over 3 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

3y ago

Lorenzo Donati‭

250 reputation 1 3 25 9