New tool that helps to detect plagiarized content released
The Sunlight Foundation today released a small app to detect plagiarized content online which they are calling “chun-alism”.
‘The tool is, essentially, an open-source plagiarism detection engine,’ web developer Kaitlin Devine explained. It will scan any text (a news article, e.g.) and compare it with a corpus of press releases and Wikipedia entries. If it finds similar language, you’ll get a notification of a detected ‘churn,’ and you’ll be able to take a look at the two sources side by side.
It’s a move in the right direction, and should help content curators build more differentiated content, curate ethically, and pro-actively avoid any copyright and ethical issues. However, the tools is pretty raw at the moment. A quick trial of the tool revealed that it only matches content from a limit set of databases such as press releases. Hopefully this can grow going forward and become more powerful.
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