Currently, the tag wiki excerpt for cheating reads:
Pertaining to preventing, punishing, or handling the consequences of academic dishonesty. Also, defining what constitutes academic dishonesty.
The tag wiki excerpt for fraud does not exist, but its wiki is:
Academic fraud can include: Plagiarism, Fabrication, Deception, Cheating, and Bribery etc.
The tag wiki excerpt for plagiarism is:
Plagiarism is the practice of taking credit for someone else’s work. Also included in this tag are questions on self-plagiarism, which involves redundant publication or reuse of one's own work in an unethical manner
There seems to be a lot of overlap here. I'm also concerned with the word 'cheating', which doesn't always seem appropriate and can be ambiguous and used inconsistently. I therefore would like the community to consider three closely related proposals:
- Rename 'cheating' to one of the following: 'academic-misconduct', 'academic-dishonesty', or 'dishonesty misconduct'. (Moderators can silently rename the entire tag without bumping all the questions)
- Merge 'fraud' into this new tag, whatever it's called. (Again, mods can do silently).
- Also merge 'plagiarism' into this new tag? There is a lot of overlap with 'cheating', I'm not sure whether it's worth losing the added specificity of 'plagiarism'.
I'm asking here rather than just proposing a tag synonym because I'm interested in hearing the rationale for approving or disapproving of these proposals.
Thoughts?
Update: in response to the objection raised by Wrzlprmft, how do we feel about renaming "fraud" to "research-misconduct"? That way it preserves the context and makes it explicit in the tag name, and will also include things like theft of intellectual property and espionage.
Second update: per the response to this question, I've renamed fraud to research-misconduct, with the following tag wiki excerpt:
On distortion of the research and/or research publication process through dishonest or otherwise unethical behavior. Includes (but is not limited to) issues such as fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, violation of ethical standards related to human subjects research, and theft of intellectual property.
and updated the cheating tag wiki excerpt to clarify the context in which it should be used:
Pertaining to preventing, punishing, or handling the consequences of academic dishonesty in coursework or examinations. Also, defining what constitutes academic dishonesty. (For questions on dishonesty in the research and/or research publication process, use 'research-misconduct' instead.)
This makes the essence of Wrzlprmft's answer - that these tags differ in the context of the misconduct - explicit in the tag excerpt.