This is quite discouraging. Why was my answer to this thread deleted?
It says converted to comment, but I do not see it anywhere. This is the 2nd time (according to my reputation record) that an answer of mine has been removed in a week (and I am using the term in the aforementioned record 'removed').
I like to think that I am making some contribution to this site, but clearly this seems not to be the case.
To answer the other part of your question, your other answer was deleted because the question as a whole has been deleted. This question was downvoted twice, closed by 5 users, and deleted by 3 different users (I personally cast the final deletion vote). The side-effect of deleting a question is to also delete all answers. So no need for paranoia here.
As for your contribution, if you care about reputation, then you could see that you were the 3rd in the league rank for june, and you're still third for July: http://stackexchange.com/leagues/191/month/academia
That means that the community values your contribution. You can of course decide to "stick to reviewing", it's entirely up to you.
I transformed your answer to a comment, because it didn't any new comment w.r.t. the other answers. Your answer was basically "It happened to me. The other answers are good. I dislike plagiarism.", which is fine, but is more a comment than an actual answer.
I do not know why your comment was deleted, the way it appears to me is that you deleted the comment yourself:
EDIT: original answer:
I have experienced this first hand as well - not a very nice feeling at all. I can only share what I did in response and it largely echoes the great advice given in the replies here. Contact the institution's dean and present the evidence, which isn't hard to do as your work is published. Plagiarism is probably the biggest peeve of mine, I find that it is a deliberate and wilful act of intellectual theft - laziness and even ignorance are not valid excuses. Any incidence needs to be tackled head on and through the right channels.
I would say that the answer is not a particularly good answer. Had it been the first answer it would have added something new, but as the 3rd answer it doesn't add much. That said, I think that it being deleted without a comment or chance to edit is a bit "harsh" and not a good behaviour shaping experience. I personally would like to see you expand the answer with your personal insights into the process as you experienced it. My guess is that a modest improvement would lead to it being un-deleted.
@Charles I appreciate the work you and the other diamond mods do. I am struggling with not making this comment sound super negative, so please read it with a grain of salt and realize I am not complaining much. In general, I think the diamond mods are pretty careful. For example, you only tend to cast close and delete votes when only one more "regular" vote is needed or the question/answer is clearly spam. In this case I would have liked for the community to have been given some more time to comment/flag the answer. Maybe even highlighting the answer in meta/chat to help get non-diamond mods into the act of managing the site. Again, I appreciate your work.
I appreciate people's concern and the discussion this has generated.
As I said in my final comment to the first answer:
okay, no problems. Got the message
I assure you, I got it, I understand, hence why I said 'I got it'.
I offered my final comment to the 2nd answer as explanation (emphasis added):
when the only information I had on hand was in the rep table stating "removed", hence why I used the word. Please, I take offense at being labelled 'paranoid'
Reputation table is reference to this (do not know what else to call it), where the word "removed" is used (without explanation), hence why I used it in my question (as I explained).
I would have liked an opportunity to fix the answer (especially in light of a new incidence that occurred a couple of hours after posting the answer), but that point is moot now.
