PATTAYA, Thailand – Readers often contact us to inquire what is the connection between Pattaya Mail and other news websites which often publish material with remarkable similarities to us. None at all. A notable example (one of dozens) is today’s Pattaya Mail article “Are Brits committing more crimes in Thailand?” which you can compare with other websites’ versions.
Semi or mosaic plagiarism occurs when another source borrows phrases or sentences or structures and presents them as its own. The other websites present their version as written “by themselves” and the only reference to Pattaya Mail is at the end of the article, conflated with other news sources which contributed no detail whatever in the original piece.
Of course, these websites have obviously rewritten the article, possibly with AI assistance, and used paraphrasing, synonyms and rearrangement. The Pattaya Mail photos have been changed. But the semi-plagiarism is astonishing even down to requoting our reference to men from “London, Liverpool and Leicester” behaving badly.
Our specific reference to The Department of Corrections prison statistics appears again and there is even a repeat of the number of arrests and detentions of British nationals in the 2024 British embassy consular report. In the original Pattaya Mail article, that embassy number was given as 220 – in fact an accidental typo for 202. One website repeats our typo error in their version which surely proves our point.
We have no problem with other media publishing our articles with appropriate credit. Indeed, several publications published in Thailand already do this. Our readers can form their own opinions.
Editor’s Note: it is important to understand what plagiarism is. Plagiarism is the act of presenting someone else’s work or ideas as your own, without giving proper credit to the original author. This can take many forms, including copying and pasting text, paraphrasing without citing sources, and using someone else’s ideas without attribution. Plagiarism is widely considered to be unethical and is taken very seriously in academic and professional contexts. (Courtesy pacworld)
