Since TheMitanni.com purports to be a serious video game news site, I felt it was worth looking into this article of questionable origin to see if Stabs had a case or if he was suffering from delusions of grandeur.
Well that looks familiar...
A few days ago I posted a summary of a battle I was in on Reddit.
Yesterday a rewritten version appeared uncredited on TMC.
A snarky comment, that I appear to have written my first TMC article, was censored.
Ho hum.
I went to the reddit post and the article in question and copied the text to Notepad++ to compare them side by side. A read-through of both at once revealed some startling similarities. While I realize that two reports of the same battle will describe the same events in the same order, I was struck by the similar beats of the texts and the order of subjects in the sentences.
Take a look, Stab's post on the left and the article on the right:
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It could be coincidence because after all the events in a battle are fixed and there are only so many ways to describe such a sequence of events. But my gut reaction as a long time writer of this blog, writer for EON Magazine, and writer/editor for the old EVE Tribune website is that this is at best a case of the TMC article writer being heavily inspired by the reddit post by Stabs, and at worst an unattributed steal of the framework for the article.
My recommendation to the editors at TMC is that they review this case themselves and implement policy's to discourage heavy borrowing of other people's work without attribution or permission. EDIT: If they have not done so already, which they probably have to be fair.
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