Review: Moral Repercussions
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 27, 2014
I know I haven’t been published long, and I haven’t written any non-fiction, but even I know it’s wrong to take information from one place and produce it as your own without crediting where you got the information. And telling others to do it as well? Double whammy.The book started off fine and actually had some good pointers on how to raise and track book sales, but when it came to explaining where to get publishable material from, these three authors lost me and actually angered me.Growing up, I went to several different schools in several different areas, and at all of them it was made blatently clear that you never, ever use Wikipedia as a source of information unless you absolutely have to. Make it a last resort. In fact, don’t use it at all.Why?Because anyone can edit the information there and make up “facts” about the topic posted.These authors tell you to “Go to Wikipedia and study the content about your topic.” While they tell you not to copy it word-for-word (welcome to the very-much illegal world of plagarism if you do), they do say: “Read about your topic of interest from Wikipedia and create the content in your own words.”In other words, use Wikipedia as your only source, which may not even have correct information on it, and just re-write everything it says in your own words – and publish it as your own work.While this may not be illegal since you’re not exactly committing plagarism, there are several things wrong with it morally. After reading that, I wanted to find and strangle the authors of this work myself. If my AP English teacher had read that, I think she would have found a shot gun. She used to fail those who cited Wikipedia in any of the papers we turned in for her class.Besides that, the book was pretty interesting and garnered several good information pieces. I would probably read those parts again if I had to, but there are other books that say similar processes, so I probably won’t, and I wouldn’t recommend this book to others – especially those in writing and publishing without moral and borderline-illegal consequences.