Background
I found an answer which a user had posted was copied verbatim from elsewhere without attribution. I flagged it for moderator attention, and thought nothing more of it.
After some thought, I was wondering if it was a one-off incident and ended up finding a pattern of the same user copying answers from elsewhere and reposting as their own answer without attribution or other acknowledgement that it wasn't their own work.
My actions
Finding plagiarised answers was very easy. Answers were copied without any attempt to change formatting, correct typos (like "sucsseful" [sic]), change references to members which didn't relate to the question (e.g. drop_down_SelectedIndexChanged when there was no dropdown anywhere), or language incongruous to the users' own (e.g. "may wanna leave it empty").
Each time I found this behaviour I left a courteous comment on the answer telling the user what they were doing wrong, linking to the plagiarised original, and imploring them to attribute the original author.
In the end, I flagged thirteen posts of that nature. Some had been accepted as answers, some upvoted as good answers, others correctly downvoted as their relation to the question was tenuous (e.g. a VB.net answer to a C# question).
I did not explicitly downvote any of the answers in the event that my findings were incorrect.
Status
As I write this, of the thirteen flags I raised, five answers have been deleted (I assume by a moderator - my flags been marked 'helpful'), one has been deleted by the user.
Status - one day later
I've just checked my flags and have seen that all thirteen posts have been marked helpful, and the posts removed (at least one I know the user removed themselves).
Question
Was I wrong to do this? I worry that my actions may be seen as bullying since I ended up going through the user's answers and searching for plagiarism. The user had been "last seen" regularly while I did this so they will have had lots of notifications from me.
Some related questions
- "What to do when plagiarism is discovered" (suggested by @hichris123)
- "Should I flag plagiarism for moderator attention?"
- "Moderator declined a plagiarism flag" (marked a duplicate of "Should I flag plagiarism for moderator attention?")
