I think there's a big difference in someone quoting something from Wikipedia to answer someone's question, and those that purposefully copy someone else's post here or 'text-spin' it just to earn from signatures
If the member isn't citing Wikipedia as the source, then I don't see any difference at all between those two cases. I've seen a lot of cases where people are copying stuff from all over the internet in order to answer questions and passing it off as their own original answer. That's plagiarism. The text spinning stuff is more devious, but we're talking about the difference between a criminal who leaves his fingerprints all over the doorknob vs. one that tries to clean up the crime scene--the offense is the same.
This is exactly why we need to thrash things out to get some completely different opinions and then try to find the optimal course of action. There are quite a few factors to consider
There are some differences here. Based on Hilariousandco's statement
Motive -
1. wiki guy - Doing it to help someone. There is not essentially any financial reward for his time and effort. We don't know for sure he is trying to claim this work for his own either he could just see nothing wrong with posting some official stats from wiki on populations or gdp figures. He may assume that people realise he did not just take a huge head count of the entire populace of the world or construct a 2000 character table of figures himself in the 2mins since someone requested it or it became relevant to post in the thread or he just may have got a bit lazy.
So he put effort, tried to help , got nothing back financially , may even consider it is quite obvious that this is not his own work.
2. text spinner - doing it to help himself, knowingly doing something wrong, trying to claim it as his own work,
I mean the act is the same but the motives and type of person to do commit both infringements are likely to be very different. 1 type i think will work well as part of a community and become net positive after a slap on the wrist. The other type has already demonstrated a clearly devious and self centered trait that will need to have a much more serious punishment to help him see things in a different light. I mean text spinners to me should not have another chance.
that is just my opinion - nothing is black and white
PM's sent to everyone that there is now zero tolerance after this date. I am sure that would choke most of them off doing it.
Basing anything on merit right now is not going to be feasible. I mean I see some excellent posters that have not even earned more than 30-50ish after all of this time. I mean top tier posters - they post on the discussion boars more than places like meta.
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