FreeCodeCamp Article Plagiarism

Contributors
1

I got an email a few days ago, where someone mentioned me in an article for FreeCodeCamp in French on hashnode.

You can see the article here.

What I soon realized was that someone took the article I published several years ago, translated it to French and claimed it as his own.

I don’t know if the account Free(nch) Code Camp is associated with FreeCodeCamp in any way, but this is blatant plagiarism.

If it is something that you are responsible for, I urge you to remove this article.

If it isn’t, I’d like to ask for your assistance in removing it.

2

freeCodeCamp is translating articles in various languages, so you could find your article translated on an official freeCodeCamp platform, but the original author is always recognised as such.

There isn’t a freeCodeCamp French publication at this time, I will bring this up internally

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Translating the article is one thing, but publishing it under another name is completely different. You can clearly see that the author of the article is not me.

Actually, I see that the author is @Davy39 and he has a forum post here → French section forum

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I tried to say that this is not in line with how freeCodeCamp translate articles, when an article is translated officially by freeCodeCamp the author is marked clearly, and at this time non-english articles are not on hashnode.

Example of one such translated article: Allineamento verticale in CSS - Come centrare un div, un testo o un'immagine (con esempi di codice)

I have raised this internally

13

This issue affects thousands of freeCodeCamp articles

I really need to wait for others to know how to proceed

Thank you for letting us know about this

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14

Hi @TomerPacific and @ILM,

I want to sincerely apologize to you, Tomer, for the frustration this has caused to you. I completely understand how this looks from your perspective: seeing your work published under another name is unacceptable, and I am truly sorry.

I want to clarify my actual intention, which was never to claim authorship or plagiarize.

I am a teacher trying to help make freeCodeCamp resources available to french students. I was building an experimental French translation frontend for freeCodeCamp news (see github issue). To achieve this technically, I needed an hashnode database with a GraphQL API to serve the translated content while building the fontend. I used Hashnode solely as a Headless CMS to feed my experimental site via their API. I though that using hashnode as a headless CMS wouln’t make the posts public, which led to this situation where it appeared I was republishing your work as my own.

I have just replied to Quincy Larson directly and, as requested, I have immediately and permanently deleted the Hashnode blog containing all the translations.

For now, and without hashnode API, I can not continue this experiment, and will wait to know how I can contribute to the french translation effort without any copyright infringement.

Again, I have the utmost respect for your work and the content you produce. Sorry for this mess.

Best regards,
Davy

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