[ganafagol]

I'm fully on board with fighting plagiarism down to that level.

But that said, I've often times wondered if this requirement of having to "rewrite in your own words" may do a lot of harm too. It obfuscates that things that people are talking about are actually exactly the same, or make it fuzzy what the exact differences are.

In a particular academic CS area I've witnessed people reproduce again and again the essentially identical description of setting and assumptions, but in being afraid of plagiarism accusations, they over and over re-formulate things which made it nonobvious that things are the same as from other authors or even from their own earlier work.

[widforss]

They could just cite someone else with proper references.