A more lasting impression was made by the notice alongside - another one of these "Let This Be A Warning To You" type notices sent out by the Registrar's Office, about student plagiarism. It seems that the miscreant in this case was a BA student who was found guilty of using Internet sources without accrediting them, and referencing sources that didn't exist.
Huh?? "Sources that don't exist" are plentiful in the Library, as the long list on the Humanities Reference Desk attests - books that borrowers liked sufficiently to weasle into their private collections permanently - but I suspect that it wasn't these that the student concerned was referencing. After all, these ones do exist, somewhere, albeit on the other side of Alice's Looking Glass.
I suspect that the sources she referenced were imaginary. Fictitious. Such was the implication from the notice. (It does rather make one wonder whether expulsion was the apprpriate sanction though - perhaps relocation to a rubber room may have been more suitable?) Why go to the trouble of inventing sources, and referencing those, rather than just referencing the sources one did consult?
But what if the sources were more than just figments of a tortured imagination?
The Internet is at best ephemeral. A source one consults and references today may well not exist tomorrow - which is why most reference management software packages have a field for "date accessed" in their internet resources forms. (Perhaps students should print off a screenprint to hand in as proof, in case they find themselves accused of similar crimes?). What if... those sources come into existence in the future? What if... the student herself were to create those documents, register those domains, upload those pages...? Linear time is not the only construction of the concept, as anthropologists will tell you. Is our student tribunal culturally biased?
A related argument has been made elsewhere against plagiarism, that the private ownership of "knowledge" (or "intellectual property"...) runs counter to warm fuzzy communalism, but no one bought that, either, iirc...