Self-plagiarism

The wikipedia entry on "plagiarism" defines "self-plagiarism" as "the reuse of significant, identical, or nearly identical portions of one’s own work without acknowledging that one is doing so or without citing the original work." Wikipedia goes on to discuss the issue, including the question of whether there can even BE such a thing, and, if so, under what circumstances is it unethical. (The wikipedia entry on plagiarism is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism)

This seems to me to be a very complicated topic. On one extreme, it seems obviously wrong if, for example, a person is getting paid to write articles for a magazine, and writes the same article for every issue (though they MIGHT be making some sort of philosophical point). On the other extreme, a person who becomes well-known for coming up with a particularly revolutionary new theory could easily end up writing about that same new theory in many different articles, and, if that person comes up with a good way to state a complex theory, it does not make sense to use different words in every article just for the sake of "originality". A person famous for the telling of a particular story may even be CRITICIZED for coming up with a new wording of the familiar anecdote.

Self-plagiarism is a particularly dubious concept when applied to the world of blogging. A person may write different blogs with different audiences, yet choose to share the same thoughts with both. Especially if a person struggles to come up with the correct words to express complex thoughts, it seems foolish NOT to use the very same words to express the same thoughts at another time or location. Another problem associated with blogging is the fact that, unlike a "hard-copy" book or magazine article, blog entries can be constantly revised, so the issue of where or when a particular passage was "first" used may become difficult to determine.

Most people seem to agree that under most circumstances you have a right to re-use your own words. The issue seems to be whether or not you ACKNOWLEDGE re-using your own words. With that in mind, I freely admit that many of the ideas stated in this blog will be identical, similar, or hopefully improved versions of ideas I state elsewhere.