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Ethical writing

Dhivehi Observer Editorial - Monday, 21st June 2004

Dhivehi Observer editorial board is noticing a lot of article contributors ignoring established standards of writing, when making their contributions to us.

Our concern mainly comes with the plagiarising writers who 'rip-off' whole articles with slight cosmetic changes to suit the writers needs. We would like to advise our contributors this brings the writers to disrepute as well as this medium and the people who make it possible.

One of the most recent such case was the article written by one S. Ibrahim on the 17 June 2004 titled "Maldives Need to Change — the Sooner the Better". It has recently been brought to our attention that this is a complete "cut and paste job" from an article by Khaled Al Maeena, Editor-in-Chief of Arab News. The article was originally titled "Arab World Needs Change — the Sooner the Better". The author is also a Senior columnist at Asharq Al-Awsat, Al Madina, Urdu News and Gulf News. We apologise to the author profusely for publishing a copied version of his article in our site without proper acknowledgement.

It is our belief that this might have happened one or twice before as well. We apologise to the authors whose work has been ripped off on different occasions. It has never been our intention.

In some cases cheating is the easy option and "borrowing" somebody's work make it easier than actually doing it yourself. While no matter how easy it is, it is un acceptable and taken as standard throughout all publishing media. In this case it opens doors for disrepute towards the works of Dhivehi Observer. We hope that our faithful readers appreciate the fact that this was not an oversight but because we were unaware of such acts being conducted by some of the contributors. These articles tend to have the same theme and we will leave it for the readers to judge to which group these belong to.

References to other works such as articles and reports is common practice but we request writer to acknowledge that as that is a fundamental rule in sharing knowledge. It is important to show respect to other writers.

DO would like to pologise from the readers for this unprofessional attitude of this specific authors and would like to assure that we will try our best to maintain the highest standard and ethics of writing.

Reading material

Avoiding plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical writing