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Dear Miriam,
I am part of a group project at work, and a sentence added by a collaborator gave me pause. Upon Googling the phrase, I discovered it was taken verbatim from a website without attribution. I can’t figure out exactly who added the phrase, but one of the possibilities includes my supervisor. What should I do?
Signed,
Unwilling Plagiarism
Dear Unwilling,
Pirkei Avot, a collection of pithy teachings and aphorisms, contains this helpful nugget: “One who says something in the name of its speaker brings redemption to the world.” This is basically the Jewish proof text for why plagiarism is wrong. (And just to cover my bases, I pulled this translation from chabad.org).
If you like the phrase where it is, and since you found where it came from, go ahead and add in the citation to the paper and move on. Since you’re in a professional environment and not a high school English class, the attribution is more important than the lesson, and it’s not worth the effort to figure out who did it and chastise them for it.
But since the phrase caught your eye, I’m guessing you don’t like it where it is. In which case, you should change it. It sounds like that’s what everyone else is doing, Wikipedia-style, so you should go in there and make your own edits to remove the plagiarized content. If anyone asks you about it or changes it back, you can explain the situation and the obvious need to remove unattributed quotes from the project. If you get pushback, you won’t necessarily want to quote Pirkei Avot, but you may be able to quote a professional handbook, code of conduct, or style guide.
If you think this needs to escalate further, you could proactively bring it up to your supervisor. Say something like, “I just wanted you to know that someone added an unattributed direct quote to this work. Once I discovered it, I fixed it, but it might be something we need to review with the staff so people know the expectations around quotes.” There are many possible explanations for how this happened, and while none of them are great, you have the opportunity to maintain a strong professional demeanor while also correcting this error and, just maybe, bringing about a small bit of redemption in this world.
Be well,
Miriam
