[Inpycon] Plagiarism at PyCon India

[Abhishek Yadav]

Hello all,
Hope you all had a good conference and are doing well.

I'd like to bring your attention towards the problem of plagiarism. As a
part of our work at the CFP workgroup this year we noticed quite a few
instances of plagiarism. Content of some talk proposals seemed plagiarised,
and some were reported to be. And there was a serious complain too after
the event concluded.

Since I could not find a policy or precedent on how to deal with it, we had
to handle the complain in a somewhat ad-hoc manner. On a superficial level,
it might seem simple, but when we go in to the intricacies there are things
beyond common sense. Things such as - how much punishment is adequate ?
What should be the mode and timeline of investigation? When should the
content be taken down - at the beginning or at the end of the investigation
? Who should we consult when the technicalities of copyright laws are
involved ?

Also, we felt that the general attitude seems to be casual about this.
Folks submitted slides from their colleagues presuming its okay since its
the same company. Folks even lifted the entire content from someone else's
website - one person even build a case for his talk (plagiarised) because
his previous talk (also probably plagiarised) was selected. In the absence
of clear consequences, it is easy to gamble - whats the worst that can
happen ? In some cases, its also non-malicious. For example, there's this
image: [1] that appears in far too many talks/proposals. People probably
just copy it from the internet assuming its okay because everyone else is
using it.

PyCon India is (or has become) reputed enough to be watched everywhere (The
complain this year was from a major American university). I think its time
to have a serious policy on plagiarism, and to also educate the community
better. I have put together a proposal in the form of pull request here -

https://github.com/zerothabhishek/policies/pull/1/files

Please take a look, and add your comments and suggestions right there.
We're ideally looking for a consensus on things like acceptable
punishments, steps to investigate, privacy etc, and the proposal can serve
as a baseline.

Plagiarism can be a big blot on our otherwise sincere effort as a
community. And our inability to handle it professionally further degrades
our reputation. Lets find a way to deal with it together.

Regards,
Abhishek

[1] https://imgur.com/a/9FFWEza
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/inpycon/attachments/20191217/b197a003/attachment.html>