The modern era brings us a lot of options on how to educate ourselves. One plausible way to do that is to follow online educators on Youtube. Siraj Raval1 is such a “teacher”. His channel, where he publishes videos about machine learning, artificial intelligence, or blockchain, has more than 700 000 followers. In 2019, he published from 2 to 4 videos per week and built several interesting tools to solve various problems. But there is a catch. To program these tools, he just re-programmed publicly available sources from the web page called github.com. This site serves as an online database where other programmers submit their codes to create a backup or to work simultaneously with other programmers. If another person wants to use such a code, the source has to be licensed to allow so. Additionally, even if the license is in place, it is common practice to give credit to the author, which Raval did. However, he did it in a slightly sneaky way. He uploaded his code to GitHub and mentioned the author at the very bottom with small letters. This may seem like a proper way of citation but if we come back to the videos on Youtube, which was his main approach to sharing the wisdom with his followers, he hasn’t mentioned a single author
If someone creates online educational videos and uses other publicly available online content as a template, where should the author be mentioned? Is it enough to mention the author in some text file that can be found under the video, or should the author be mentioned in the description of the video or even mentioned verbally in the video?
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- What are your views about this case?
- Have you ever noticed an academic using an online tool without properly giving credit to the authors?
- Do you see such action as a case of plagiarism?
- What do you think should be the right approach?
- Is it correct to use publicly available tools without giving credit?
You are welcome to share your views about this case and engage in a discussion with others.