Is copying Wikipedia VERBATIM to answer a Yahoo answers question cheating?
1. Well yes, it could well be. The whole point of Yahoo! Answers is to share knowledge, with the underlying assumptions that (a) the asker has no other practical way of acquiring the knowledge, and (b) that the responder either has all the required knowledge, or sufficient background orientation to undertake a brief amount of research to prepare a more complete answer. That’s the theory, anyway. 2. If you have no idea about the answer, then maybe you should desist from attempting to answer. However I have found some questions provoking enough for me to want to find out something from scratch. When that happens, as far as possible, I put the answer in my own words (and to make sure that I address the question asked), but I always provide a link to the webpage source. At the same I try to avoid wikipedia, because it is so commonly used, that it becomes tired and naff to do so. 3. Sometimes I do copy and paste, but only when the copied section is too valuable to be abridged. When I do tha
