> > Finally, all y'all foolios should stop dissing Benet's. > While you shouldn't write questions out of it wholesale, it's till > a tremendous reference tool and a valuable source for finding solid > question topics. I don't think anyone's disrespecting Benet's as a useful tool for the purpose of studying, or of finding question topics. However, it shouldn't be lost on anyone (though apparently it is lost on a great many question writers) that writing from it as the sole source is a bad idea. For one thing, in many cases Benet's is either inaccurate or actually wrong (it may be because I'm overly sensitive of it, but almost all of the mistaken mythological questions I tend to hear these days have their origin in some Benet's entry). For another, Benet's _is_ widely studied, such that familiarity with the exact language used is acquired by many, and when it is quoted verbatim players are able to get questions of the language alone (as Adam mentioned), which sucks a lot. I find it amusing that this whole thread started with use of the word "plagiarism". _Technically_, plagiarism is not simply the use of exact words, but extends to any use of information contained in a source without citation of it (a distinction which I cannot seem to impress upon my History 104 students). Based on that definition, I'm certainly guilty of plagiarism, in that I don't think I have once yet begun a tossup with "According to _The Encyclopaedia Britannica_, this man was born in..."; I suspect all question writers are. I recommend we all continue to plagiarise the hell out of our sources (after all, it's better to use pirated facts than, say, make them up; makes answering a little easier, I'd suspect); nevertheless, I voice my repeated and eternal objection to verbatim quoting. For God's sake, how hard is it to change "ingenious idiot" into "clever simpleton"? Just my opinion, which pretty much has the weight of immutable eternal law.
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