I received a document today from a colleague relating to a project we’re undertaking over the next few months.
The document had been prepared by my predecessor, somebody I haven’t met and have only heard about second hand.
I opened the document and my first impression was it was pretty robust and detailed piece of work. It was quite well executed and full of some very specific advice about deploying SharePoint; particularly in a virtualized environment.
However, the more I read the more I noticed it’s unusual tone. It seem a little to effusive and upbeat and its choice of tense in a few locations seemed to jar with the overall nature of the document.
It also contained a significant number of disclaimers, more than I’d ever seen in an internal document, and certainly more than I would expect given the nature of the organisation I’m currently working with.
So I decided to extract a few sentences and run them through Google.
And what did I find….
Of the eleven or so pages in the document, I’d say around 6 pages, the bulk of the text, were lifted directly, and without modification, from Microsoft documents about SharePoint.
No attribution, no references, no footnotes. All of it claimed as original work.
In my opinion, a clear case of plagiarism.
Am I surprised? Not entirely, I’ve been around long enough to see and hear about some pretty odd behaviors by people.
But it still leaves me incredulous that someone would risk their job and the professional reputation in such away.
Was it lazyness? Was it a cover for lack of knowledge? Was it lack of time? Lack of motivation?
I’ll never know.
But on the plus side, I’ve discovered some useful Microsoft documents about SharePoint 
3 Responses
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What differentiates sharepoint from other, more functional, wikis ?
Well, you are right, SharePoint is a terrible wiki.
I guess it depends. It’s far, far more complicated than wiki solutions like MediaWiki or Confluence, but its a lot cheaper and empowers uses much more than ECM tools like TRIM.
I’m not a huge fan, I don’t find SharePoint sites particularly easy to work with, but its integration with Office/Windows for document management and version control is better than ‘yet another network drive’, and it does put a lot of power into users hands.
I think this sort of “lifting” is quite common. I’ve seen it a few times and normally the alarm bells start ringing when, as you say, the tone of the document chops and changes.
and mentioned in the Annual report.
Lazy, pushed for time…is it also a matter of education – that people don’t know that they should reference material copied from another source?
I think that IT managers also have a responsibility to set standards, and that if they fail to insist on quality, then they are partly to blame. As I am on my way to a tech writing qualification, I recently reviewed some IT policies produced by an expensive consultant. These were critical policies (DR, service continuity) and had been signed off by the two IT managers and the CIO. I was amazed the document had passed muster – the first sentence of the first paragraph wasn’t complete, and the rest of the document was not a policy, just a collection of random ambiguous statements that literally didn’t make any sense at all, syntactically or contextually. The docs were scanned and up on the intranet (sharepoint of course
Sigh.
One word springs to mind… accountability.