(Click the Image to get a good look at how to present copied text on Mahalo Answers)

Only copy a portion of the text, no more than four paragraphs, and never a full article. You want to make sure you are copying only a small portion of the article. If you copy more then one paragraph it helps to separate the blocks of text with your own text analysis.

When you do rely on copying somebody else's information as your answer, you always want to provide some original text from yourself, on Mahalo Answers you can perhaps explain why you are using this source and maybe even explain why you trust it.

Most importantly when you copy and paste text into an answer on Mahalo Answers, you need to separate the copied text from your original text. What we prefer on Mahalo Answers is that you add --quote-- at the beginning and ---/quote--- at the end of the copied text. For shorter sentences and paragraphs it is also acceptable to use quotation marks.

Acknowledge your paste job by mentioning the source in your answer text and it is essential and vital that you provide a link to the exact location where you found the text you copied.

(Click image to get full detail of how quoting looks on Mahalo Topic Pages)

Mahalo would prefer that the text within the Guide Note section of a Mahalo topic page is 100% original writing free of any form of reliance on copy and pasting. However, Mahalo guide notes do contain news sections, and with news quoting sources and subjects is common. When a Page Manager users a quote found elsewhere on the web it is most important the a citation (ref tags) is added at the end of the quote.

If a Mahalo page uses a lot of quotes, consider creating a text section in your guide note with the title "Quotes." Italicize the text by putting two apostrophes on either side of the quote and add reference tags and link to the website.

Mahalo has a homemade plagiarism tool that you can use to find copy and pasted text. Here is how to install and use it.
Step 1: Go to the Plagiarism tool page
Step 2: In the Firefox browser, right click your bookmark toolbar and select "new bookmark." Create a new bookmark and name it "Plagiarism?"
Step 3: Copy the code from the Plagiarism tool page and paste it the "location" field found in the new bookmark properties.

To use the tool, highlight any text you find and click your new "Plagiarism?" button, it will search Google and find out if the code has been copied from any other sources.

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