This is a request for all the bloggers out there to redact the last name of “Laura” in your posts about plagiarism.

Back in the early days, before the web was invented, Usenet was only read by the geekiest of the geeks on academic campuses. No one imagined that what they were saying would be permanent. No one imagined that anyone outside of their small circle would read it.

But I’ve known people that, ten years later, lost jobs because of postings they had made on Usenet. If that happens as a result of relatively obscure discussion groups, what will happen to what we say on the web? Everything we write here is permanent, archived by the Wayback machine if nothing else. And so, ten or twenty years from now, the top Google results for this poor woman’s name will likely be “X is a plagiarist”. The only way to prevent that would be for the weblogs who have talked about this issue to redact her name.

Should she receive a sanction? Of course. But the authorities of her school are the appropriate parties to determine that. There’s no need for angry mob justice that will make her the online personification of plagiarism for the rest of her life. For one mistake, that isn’t an appropriate punishment.

We might as well make her wear an embroidered “P” on her chest.

Sure, our mistakes follow all of us through life. And we can usually overcome them with effort. But, at bottom, you have a choice: to help this woman or to contribute to her harm. When it costs you nothing to help someone, even a little, why not help? The size of the harm you’re inflicting doesn’t change the basic choice.

How you make that choice determines part of who you are, I believe.

Realistically, of course, this woman will never be able to earn her good name back, at least not on the internet. So redacting probably won’t make a difference - this thing is too big, the full story is out there, and most people won’t bother. But there’s an old saying, which I am about to botch entirely: “Idealism is like a path through the forest; it can only appear if everyone walks the same way”.

There’s no reason to contribute to the angry mob justice, if you don’t have to. This young woman plainly won’t be repeating her mistake in the foreseeable future, and so I can’t comprehend the desire to pile-on and contribute to the public humiliation of someone you don’t even know.

UPDATE: Will Baude thinks that people should be responsible for the shit they pull. I do too. But I don’t think it’s my job to punish every wrongdoer, at least not when the appropriate authorities are handling it.

In the modern world, we don’t make sinners wear scarlet letters; and when we inflict capital punishment on a criminal, we don’t let the community of uninvolved but pissed-off bystanders start throwing stones.