So I'll come out in a neutral position to express my opinion, especially since I've merited the accused topic. I'm a non-native English speaker, so I have to often confront translation issues myself. Thought it would be nice to give an answer to this thread.

To answer your first question, I honestly never contemplated whether it was Ratimov who wrote the introduction or it was taken from one of the sources mentioned below. To be fair, the fact that the thread starts with "In this article I would like to touch upon" does make it seem like Ratimov was the one to write and compile the topic from zero but I, at least personally, do not necessarily feel offended by it.

Now for the second question of yours, I have mixed feelings. If Ratimov wanted to hide the fact that the thread was not written by him, he could've used his own words and do a complete translation and rewrite of the text. And had he done that, we all would've suspected him for text spinning and plagiarism.

Having seen a lot of threads throughout my BTCTalk experience, I thought Ratimov's thread deserved a merit especially since it's well organized and the information he's provided is interesting, not that easy to discover and different to what you usually see around here. I often see threads that are either completely uninteresting or have a very bad layout. I often struggle organizing my own threads and find myself not being able to make it pleasant to the eye even after hours of editing, so I always appreciate well-written posts.

I also know what it takes to write a thread well enough to be appreciated by others over here. From what I've seen, most of the CM participants have a long history of high quality posts and so I don't really feel like checking their posts for plagiarism. And while I do kinda feel like he's "cheated" since I spend hours and hours on a post written from zero to earn the same/less merit than Ratimov does for a copied one, I do not consider I have the right to complain in this situation since I have not bothered to check the sources beforehand (and even if I did, the key source is in an unknown language to me anyway).

As far as I've seen, copied posts are allowed on the forum as soon as you mention the sources in the footer. Ratimov's threads do have the sources mentioned, so I think having an issue about Ratimov not mentioning the author's name is a bit far-fetched since I don't think I've seen someone else do that when quoting/copying information from a source.

But on the other hand, I don't agree with Ratimov's POV either ("Chipmixer pays for 50 posts, that is, I write about 20 posts for free"). While the maximum amount of paid posts is 50 and you exceed it by 20 more, you cannot ignore that a part of your recent merit comes from "free" posts that you copy from other websites when you know that the high amount of appreciation is one of the probable reasons DS accepted you (and is still keeping you) in the campaign he manages.

As I said, I am neutral in this situation though. I do not feel like being necessarily cheated for giving the merit, and if that thread does not deserve it then I'm sure there are many others written by Ratimov which do - so if that's the case, then take it as if I have given him a merit for all his work on the forum so far. I take it as plagiarism when there's no source mentioned - and Ratimov did mention the exact sources, which should go in tandem with the forum rules. The fact that the official definition of plagiarism does not fit the forum's is a different thing.

Hopefully my reply comes in as a helpful one for the accusation - and, hopefully, no hard feelings