7.4.7 How to Determine if Content is Copied

How do you determine whether all or most of the MC is copied? How do you identify the original source of the content? These things can be difficult to determine, but the following steps may help.

1. Copy a sentence or a series of several words in the text. It may be necessary to try a few sentences or phrases from the page just to be sure. When deciding what sentence or phrase to copy, try to find a sentence or series of several words without punctuation, unusual characters, or suspicious words that may have replaced the original text.

2. Search on Google by pasting the sentence or phrase (surrounded by quotation marks) inside the Google search box.

Here are some sentences and phrases from this page about “The Wizard of Oz” film and how to search for them.

Proprietary and Confidential – Copyright 2015 45

Sentence or Phrase From a Sentence	Query to Find the Sentence or Phrase
A sentence on the page:	Query with quotation marks around the sentence:
	[ “All are convinced by Dorothy that the Wizard can help them too” ]
All are convinced by Dorothy that the	Query without quotation marks around the sentence:
Wizard can help them too
	[ All are convinced by Dorothy that the Wizard can help them too ]
A phrase on the page:	Query with quotation marks around the phrase:
	[ “Dorothy uses the Golden Cap to summon the Winged Monkeys” ]
Dorothy uses the Golden Cap to	Query without quotation marks around the phrase:
summon the Winged Monkeys
	[ Dorothy uses the Golden Cap to summon the Winged Monkeys ]
	Query with quotation marks around the phrase:
A different phrase on the page:	[ “revealing an old man who had journeyed to Oz from Omaha long
revealing an old man who had	ago in a hot air balloon” ]
	Query without quotation marks around the phrase:
journeyed to Oz from Omaha long ago
in a hot air balloon	[revealing an old man who had journeyed to Oz from Omaha long ago
	in a hot air balloon ]

3. Compare the pages you find that match the sentence or phrase. Is most of their MC the same? If so, does one clearly come from a highly authoritative source which is known for original content creation (newspaper, magazine, medical foundation, etc.)? Does one source appear to have the earliest publication date? Does one source seem to reasonably be the original?

Use your best judgment. Sometimes it is clear that the content is copied from somewhere, but you cannot tell what the original source is. Other times the content found on the original source has changed enough that searches for sentences or phrases may no longer match the original source. For example, Wikipedia articles can change dramatically over time. Text copied from old copies may not match the current content. If you strongly suspect the page you are evaluating is not the original source, consider it likely to be copied.

We have confirmed that the above text (the text in the sentence and phrases in the table) comes from an older version of a Wikipedia article about “The Wizard of Oz,” which can be found using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Please note that searching for the above sentence and phrases will not lead you to a current Wikipedia article about “The Wizard of Oz,” which demonstrates how confirming that the MC of a page contains copied content can sometimes be difficult.

Important: The Lowest rating is appropriate if all or almost all of the MC on the page is copied with little or no time, effort, expertise, manual curation, or added value for users. Such pages should be rated Lowest, even if the page assigns credit for the content to another source.