The single greatest use for Wikipedia I've ever seen...

[electricsoup_erman]

Awesome thing to do with Wiki.

Pick something. ANYTHING and see how many clicks it takes to get to Hitler

From Bioware it takes 9 clicks. haha

I got 4 clicks

OT. I used Wikipedia for practically every assignment up until year 11 when teachers started to specifically state that no one could use wikipedia on any one of the assignments. Once i used that Einstein quote "2 things are infinite; the universe and human stupidity... And i'm not to sure on the universe." The teacher didn't think it was real and gave me an E. I didn't really care about grades then so i didn't clarify it to him.

 

[fix-the-spade]

Maybe not ethical, but not against the rules---kind of like Lance Armstrong's alleged steroid use?

Interesting to note about those claims is that they didn't start to surface until after the UCI had destroyed the relevant samples (after 5 years no less).

Funny that the shouting didn't start until the evidence was no longer available...

 

[aznj03]

11th grade english: We had a take home final which was an essay. My friend had my teacher for the first half of the year and the topic was the same. I handed in his essay, word for word, only changing the name and date. He got an 86 on it, I got a 94.

 

[EatPieYes]

In an science essay I had to do in high school, I copy-pasted the whole thing. This single essay helped me pass the course. The thing was that I was so late with sending it in that the teacher didn't even check the sources. That's what I think, anyway. It was right before the summer vacation also, so the teacher, I guess, was just happy that she got it in.

Not a proud moment, but I don't feel bad about it, either. I just didn't care for the subject. At all.

 

[joshuaayt]

Awesome thing to do with Wiki.

Pick something. ANYTHING and see how many clicks it takes to get to Hitler

http://thewikigame.com/

Thank. You. So. Much.
Just played, got from some band to Green Bay Packers football team with five seconds to spare. Now I have something to do when I procrastinate.
And my answer to the question?
Well...I did once cite my own blog... filled with information I put in the night before. Hey, I was *pretty* sure it was legit. Anyway, teacher tells that something is all wrong, checks my source and whaddya know? The internet DID tell me the wrong answer. I still lost a few marks for "not verifying", but I passed purely on information I was kinda sure about.
Don't worry, it was only high school. I imagine that shit wouldn't fly at a bigshot college.

 

[Underground Man]

My favorite is one that spares me a trip to the library. Just go to Amazon.com and find a book about the topic you're researching. If you're lucky, the book will have a "search inside" option. Just use that and use a quote from there. It works every time.

You can use the "samples" from Google books, too.

Technically, citing something by stealing someone else's citation is still plagiarism, at least according to that stupid research course I took. But since it's harder to trace, people get away with it all the time. IMO, if you can get away with it, more power to ya. Besides, some of the greatest and/or well-known works of literature are derivative and blatantly plagiarized or misattributed: the Bible, Shakespeare, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a Dream" speech....

 

[Girl With One Eye]

Take a book/paper, go to the part where they list their sources and got their quotes from. List them as your own.

 

[burningdragoon]

I got to write a paper on samurai swords my first semester of college, which was about as triumphant any bullshitting I did in school got. I'm pretty awful at it.

Curious about the topics that you cited Cracked and ZP for, though.

 

[Buzz Killington_v1legacy]

Man, I miss the days when I could get away with dodgy citations, or weird sources like TVTropes. Right now, though, I'm working on my PhD thesis, and one of my examiners is almost certainly going to be the guy who literally wrote the book on my little niche subject, so I've got to be really rigorous about the whole thing. Bleah.

 

[Azure-Supernova]

My Sociology work for college had several George Carlin quotes from 'Brain Droppings' and 'Napalm and Silly Putty'. Usually though, I do pretty much the same thing.

 

[Rednog]

Ripping off plots/characters/backstories from games/comics/movies and using them for creative writing classes and art classes.
And I got away with using the exact same references for like a year and a half (not that I didn't use sources, I'm just too lazy to write them up) because only like 1 in a hundred actually bother to look at the reference/bibliography page.
And the only reason I got caught is because my idiot roommate wanted to use my printer for his paper and in some really stupid mixup he threw his cover page on an extra copy of my paper (we had to print 2 copies, one for the teacher one for the TAs) and they thought we were trying to cheat.

 

[marurder]

As a teacher I prefer all my students to email me their work. If I think there is something there they didn't do, I simply copy paste it into google. If I get a match and the student copied their article from the internet INSTA-Fail.

 

[SimuLord]

As a teacher I prefer all my students to email me their work. If I think there is something there they didn't do, I simply copy paste it into google. If I get a match and the student copied their article from the internet INSTA-Fail.

Big difference between copying an article and playing fast and loose with the relevance of one's citations. I write 100% original material (read the latest paper for yourself [http://cpabyforty.blogspot.com/2010/09/cycle-of-life-mgt323-paper.html] if you like). I just finesse the research.

Which in turn makes me wonder. I usually post my material up on my blog before I turn it in for first-publication copyright reasons (so I can retain undisputed ownership of my work). If you googled my paper and it gave you an exact match for my own blog, would you INSTA-Fail me for having an exact match online?

 

[GenericAmerican]

I cited a video game once...i really, really, was hard pressed to find a 10th source on something I didn't want to do. But she took it.

 

[SimuLord]

I got to write a paper on samurai swords my first semester of college, which was about as triumphant any bullshitting I did in school got. I'm pretty awful at it.

Curious about the topics that you cited Cracked and ZP for, though.

I cited Cracked for a paper on the validity of Myers-Briggs (the Cracked guys basically wrote exactly the paper I'd been working on, except theirs was funny, so I cited the shit out of it).

My ZP citation was for a paper in Core Humanities 202 where I said of Voltaire's Candide: "The only way 'Candide' could be any more awesome would be, to steal a line from Internet game critic Ben Croshaw, "if it had tits and was on fire." (Croshaw 2009)" I knew my teacher had the sense of humor to appreciate the quote.

 

[ejb626]

I was writing a paper on Nostradamus when I was slammed with another paper on any topic I wanted, being lazy I decided to make that one on Nostradamus so I could turn the same paper in for both classes. This backfired on me though because while with the first one the rough draft was only currently due, for the second one the final copy was due. I turned in the rough draft for both so I ended up getting a poor grade on my piss-poor grammar in the second one, while in the first one I was given reminders of what to fix.

Acknowledging the post above me, I once had to find a set number of examples of prejudice in fiction so I used the relationship between humans and elites in Halo 3 and got a perfect score on the project.

 

[SimuLord]

Acknowledging the post above me, I once had to find a set number of examples of prejudice in fiction so I used the relationship between humans and elites in Halo 3 and got a prefect score on the project.

So what score did Ford Prefect give you? And did he get you off the planet before the Vogons showed up?

 

[MetroidNut]

I had a teacher last year that was...easily manipulated.

We had to orally present most of our classwork to him; typically, this ended up being a lengthy discussion in which we were graded on our knowledge. It turns out that during these discussions, though, if you threw in just the right amount of bullshit to get him started, he would tell you the answer he expected. Then you could basically agree with him and get full credit.

 

[ejb626]

Acknowledging the post above me, I once had to find a set number of examples of prejudice in fiction so I used the relationship between humans and elites in Halo 3 and got a prefect score on the project.

So what score did Ford Prefect give you? And did he get you off the planet before the Vogons showed up?

Oh thanks for pointing out my grammatical error there usually Firefox's spell check catches that but I guess prefect is a real word allow me to change that now.

 

[TheLefty]

Zero Punctuation.

What, in the god I don't believe's name, was the quote? We all want to know.

On topic, I have cited Escapist articles once or twice, on on how videogames should be equal to other media, (that one about the professor who is using Portal in the class) and one other time but I forget. I also have tried to quote Harlan Wade, from F.E.A.R, when he said "it is the way of man to create monsters and the nature of monster to destroy their creators" but I ended up having to take it out after a revision made it useless.