Barricades seem to be a pretty standard method for revolting against governments in the 19th Century. What was the "ideal plan" (if that's a proper way of putting it) for getting from "make a barricade" to "independence/new government"?

Hello everyone and welcome to the seventh installment of our continuing series of Rules Roundtables! This project is an effort to demystify what the rules of the subreddit are, to explain the reasoning behind why each rule came into being, provide examples and explanation why a rule will be applicable in one case and not in another. Finally, this project is here to get your feedback, so that we can hear from the community what rules are working, what ones aren't, and what ones are unclear.

Time to talk about the darkest word in the ivory tower, the P word. I pulled one of our shortest rules from the modly drawing-straws bundle for doing these Roundtables, a rule which I will now quote in its entirety for easy reference:

We have a zero-tolerance policy on blatant plagiarism, such as directly copying and pasting another person's words and trying to pass them off as your own. This will result in an instant ban.

It’s also notably one of the vaguer rules, and that’s for a reason: we need to call plagiarism like we see it and we don’t want play pop-the-weasel with every rules-lawyer who gets banned for it. However, that’s a potentially problem for you, honest poster, who may not know intimately what plagiarism is from school or whatnot. What academic plagiarism and how not to do it is typically part of the coursework for every first year college program in the Western world, what to cite and how and when to cite it in academic writing can be that complicated. So first off, we do not get down to the brass tacks of plagiarism on the true academic scale here, because we don’t actually want to grade papers.

Our internal “honor code” is limited to a much simpler definition of plagiarism, which basically comes down to good intent. Did you intend to write something in your own words and did you intend a certain passage to be read as a quote, did you show good faith by some form of attribution, or did you intend to reap some worthless karma from the prose of others?

We do not have a house citation style, many people like to cite in many ways, some like to cite conversationally and in the text (this theory is from this book), and some people like to get really fancy and do footnotes with full APA! Both are okay. If you in some fashion give credit to the work and words of others when you use them, you are not going to be banned. If you feel borderline about something, you should cite it. You're never going to get in trouble for giving too many citations! It's really as simple as that.

#Have you actually banned people under this rule?

Yes. It is almost always egregious and obvious. Most people have directly copied and pasted either Wikipedia (why), some other free online source, or (at least going for quality I suppose) an old answer from a similar r/AskHistorians thread, with no attribution. There was one rather complicated case with a poster merging many select pieces of prose available from Google Books previews into an impressive patchwork posting history of answers, but that was the only “good” case. We also once banned a guy for shamelessly copying and pasting whole selections from some poor academic's blog, but it turned out that it was actually that poster's blog! So that poster was unbanned, but reminded that citing yourself is the highest compliment. The rest are just obvious and boring.

#What if I post someone else’s words and I attribute it?

You will not be banned for this, as it falls within the spirit of good intent. However, if you just post a quote that falls within the “No posting just a link or quote” rule, so it will be removed. Sharing an attributed quote within a longer post in your own words is of course encouraged!

The proper way to format a quote on Reddit so that everyone knows it is a quote is

like so, simply put a >in front on the first line of the paragraph

However, if you wish to share a good answer from a past thread, please do not copy and paste the entire thing and then attribute it, just post a link to the older comment. People who write answers here just really don’t like this, and often you lose a lot of formatting and links anyway. People really love a username tag if you’ve discovered something of theirs in the archives though!

#Wow, this is just reddit, why don’t you calm down

This is the most common indignant defense in modmail to being banned for plagiarism. The short answer is that we are not “just reddit.” There are many different posting modes and registers here on this website, and there is no “just reddit.” We are a community who happens to be hosted on reddit, and the community is here in the spirit of personal intellectual growth and the sharing of good information, whatever that may be for you. You may participate in that spirit by reading, you may participate by asking, and you may participate by writing. If you choose to participate by writing, you must participate in good faith by sharing your own words and thoughts. Taking credit for others' words and thoughts is not participating at all, and it will get you banned. For a longer reasoning on the positive qualities of fighting plagarism in a community, check out the plagarism guide from Princeton University.

I used the search-function, but only found one unanswered similar question: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1svw6c/in_wars_that_saw_extensive_trench_usage/

I know this sounds ridiculous, but it's mostly out of curiosity regarding this comment where a a guy claims to be a sword collector who's spent upwards to 300 grand on a single sword.

From what I know about japanese history, Bushido and the honorable samurai is a myth, much like how chivalry was mostly a myth, propagated by popular culture and movies such as those of akira kurosawa.

Real samurai in the beginning were basically mercenaries, whose primary weapons were the bow and arrow. I do believe that there isn't any serious mention of the katana until the 1500s, which was actually a ploy to make the samurai appear more prestigious, with the katana becoming a symbol of the warrior class.

So if all these amazing swords were being made 700 years ago, ie 1300s, why weren't the samurai using them, or even making mention of them until more than 200 years later?

Originally, I thought Katanas were crap, because they were made of crap steel by swordsmiths who tried their best to make it not suck. On the battlefield, the bow and arrow, spears and even daggers were favored over the sword.

But I could be wrong. I've never handled an actual antique sword before. Anyway, anyone who has knowledge of antique japanese swords, or even better, records of Europeans who've encountered the swords would be appreciated.

tl;dr : anyone know of historical sources regarding the quality of japanese swords circa 1300s?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LIkSH0mCPSw

https://www.facebook.com/rose.lewis.77/posts/934272269974228

I saw this floating around and I'm leaning to it being so much crap, but I can't find good information one way or the other about it. Could anyone shed some light on this?

I'm mostly going by this post here which states, to my understanding, that technology is not linearly progressive and that humans adopted agriculture because it became more convenient as populations grew and resources were further depleted. My question is therefore how did some societies not (/fully) develop agriculture (such as native Australians, though I acknowledge they farmed eels)? Did these problems of overpopulation or depletion of resources not plague these societies? Did these problems plague them but they lacked the resources to develop agriculture?