Today Jeremy Adams of Puppet informed me one of my articles, a comparison on Ansible, Salt, Puppet and Chef got copied by someone else on LinkedIn. It was quite a shameless copy at that.
Original text: “In this article, I present a feature-driven comparison overview of four IT Infrastructure Automation (DevOps) tools: Ansible, Chef, Puppet and SaltStack. Without further ado, here it is”
Copied text: “In this article, I exhibit a component driven correlation outline of four IT Infrastructure Automation (DevOps) devices: Ansible, Chef, Puppet and SaltStack. Right away, here it is”
I am not a native English speaker (although hey, http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20161028-native-english-speakers-are-the-worlds-worst-communicators) but I do think my wording is better than the copycat. Maybe the copycat ran it through some reverse-translator (translate to another language and back to English). The regular grammar checker in Office did not notice anything out of the ordinary, however.
Let’s have some fun with the resulting text.
First, grammar. I used Grammarcheck (https://www.grammarcheck.net/), which informs me that “I exhibit a component driven correlation outline” contains complex expressions (but is not incorrect). The copied text contains a lot of these complex expressions.
I then ran it through an online plagiarism checker (available at https://toolkit.thepensters.com), which found more plagiarism: paraphrased texts on the tool Salt, to be exact, apparently copied from a webpage at Xebialabs. The paraphrased text fortunately is not in my original article. Another plagiarism checker found that texts on Ansible were copied as well, from Wikipedia this time.
Finally, I used diffchecker (https://www.diffchecker.com/), which was more than happy to tell me 154 items were removed and 163 added. The added items were actually sentences describing the various tools I compared, which – as I found out earlier, were copied from other websites. The screenshot below shows my article on the left, the copycat version on the right.
What diffchecker shows is quite unsettling. Certain words in the original article are replaced by synonyms. The copycat failed to check the result, which leads to hilarious errors. One of the tools (Chef) ends up being translated to Gourmet. And instead of tools, we are now comparing devices. It does get worse, however: when I write “The disadvantage is that performance and scalability of the entire solution is impacted by an additional component”, these three terms are translated with execution, versatility and wholearrangement, which leads to “The disadvantage is that execution and versatility of the whole arrangement is impacted by an additional component”. Now that just does not make sense anymore.
I ran my original text through an online synonymizer (which is not an English word, so good luck plagiarizing that!) at https://smallseotools.com/article-rewriter/. As it slowly built the resulting text, I sort of hoped it would give me the exact same version the copycat produced. Sadly, it did not. It does, however, produce another hilarious error: Chef is now Cook. Fortunately, it did not replace Azure with Blue, or Puppet with Marionette.
Another rewriter tool (https://articlerewritertool.com/) produces similar, unsettling results. I wrote “Ansible has the widest range of master support”. What I meant to say is that Ansible supports the widest range of operating systems for its master node. My original wording still is a lot better than the resulting translation, which is “Ansible has the greatest scope of ace help”. The results of this tool are remarkably similar to the copycat article. Culprit found.
I noticed that the copied article got more likes than my original. Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery, I guess. I cannot help but wonder if all the likers and commenters actually read the article, considering the strange translation errors.
[29-12-2017] The copycat has removed the image (a pasted Excel) from the copied article, possibly in an attempt to make it look less like the original?