Here is Western Michigan University's current definition of plagiarism, adopted in 2016.

"Plagiarism is the use of someone else’s language, ideas, or other material without making the source(s) evident in situations where there is a legitimate expectation of original work.  Plagiarism does not occur when efforts to promptly identify sources by making source use apparent to the audience of the submitted material are obvious.  Plagiarism may not necessarily include mistakes in citation style.

A legitimate expectation of original work exists for numerous circumstances, including (but not limited to): scholarly writing, technical presentations and papers, conference presentations and papers, online discussion postings, grant proposals, patents, book and other manuscripts, theses and dissertations, class assignments, artistic works, computer code, algorithms, and other creative works.

This definition applies to the entire WMU community, which includes all faculty; students; staff; visiting faculty, scholars, administrators; and any other person governed by academic research and other policies of the University."

This is the introduction to a series of videos for graduate students on understanding plagiarism and how to avoid it.

Click on the "CC" button in each video to see the closed captioned text.

These are documents Ed Eckel has handed out at the workshops he's given on plagiarism for the Graduate College. They relate to his presentation.