Reports suggest plagiarism is rife in universities. The internet has provided a “wealth of information that can be plagiarised”, says Wendy Sutherland-Smith, an expert in plagiarism from Deakin University. As a result, a Times investigation two years ago found almost 50,000 students were caught cheating in the previous three years, amounting to a so-called “plagiarism epidemic”. The government and universities are meanwhile desperately trying to crack down on essay-mill websites, which write essays for paying students.This could be prevented by using a tool like Copybot to check for plagiarism from Wikipedia (and other sources).
Copybot shows you exactly which passages of homework, essays and papers were copied, and from where.
Most plagiarism checkers will store and use your documents on checks for other users, which is a questionable privacy practice. Copybot is a bit more focused on privacy and stores your document until you delete it, but it is not
visible or accessible to anyone but you. The document is only stored to
allow you to access it and see the results, but it is not used for other
plagiarism checks.
