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Wikipedia Plagiarism Ends Journalist's Career

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sun Jan 15, 2006 10:32 AM
from the someone-quick-post-this-story-into-wikipedia dept.
News
An anonymous reader writes "Tim Ryan, a 21 year veteran entertainment columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin, was fired yesterday after an investigation revealed multiple instances of his incorporating unattributed paragraphs from other sources. This case is unique in that it was first revealed by Wikipedia after an attentive Wikipedia editor noted similarities between a Wikipedia article and one of Ryan's columns. However he wasn't fired until after other news outlets started to run the story. Sadly, though the Star-Bulletin has admitted to the plagiarism, they failed to publicly acknowledge that Wikipedia was responsible for bringing this situation to light."
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  • However (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15 2006, @10:33AM (#14475666)
    The new WikiStar-Bulletin has been edited to reflect this fact.

  • How much more that we don't know about? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CyricZ (887944) on Sunday January 15 2006, @10:35AM (#14475675)
    This really makes one wonder how much additional plagiarism is present in the articles and reports presented by the mass media on a daily basis.

    • Agreed (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15 2006, @10:37AM (#14475679)
      This really makes one wonder how much additional plagiarism is present in the articles and reports presented by the mass media on a daily basis.

          • Re:Indeed. (Score:5, Funny)

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15 2006, @10:58AM (#14475779)
            This really makes one wonder how much additional plagiarism is present in the articles and reports presented by the mass media on a daily basis.

            I think there's a lot. For example, Tim Ryan, a 21 year veteran entertainment columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin, was fired yesterday after an investigation revealed multiple instances of his incorporating unattributed paragraphs from other sources. This case is unique in that it was first revealed by Wikipedia after an attentive Wikipedia editor noted similarities between a Wikipedia article and one of Ryan's columns. However he wasn't fired until after other news outlets started to run the story. Sadly, though the Star-Bulletin has admitted to the plagiarism, they failed to publicly acknowledge that Wikipedia was responsible for bringing this situation to light.
            • the future: everyone in the world is able to write whatever they want, and have it available to anyone else in the world, instantly.

              we're getting there, not yet, we're limited now by Internet access and by search, both of which are being vigorously corrected.

              so in this future world, writing is no longer as interesting or as important as it has been in the past. writing will become EPHEMERAL, like sound on a phone call. it used to be that getting written word out was relatively hard (at first really hard i
              • How can anything be self plagiarism? Plagiarism means not giving credit where credit is due. If you wrote the assignment once, handing it again under your name is still giving proper attribution.

                If I understood properly, the evil of plagiarism is that you're misleading the reader as to who wrote it. Either it's not plagiarism or the university in question has some misleading definition of plagiarism. I understand why a university would be opposed to it (it wants a certain amount of work out of you), but cal

    • Re:How much more that we don't know about? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by A beautiful mind (821714) on Sunday January 15 2006, @10:41AM (#14475697)
      Since the only (ok, maybe not) thing I'm much more qualified in than the average from what is presented sometimes in the mainstream media is IT, I can only judge the media based on the IT news they are reporting.

      Based on that, the mainstream media fails to pass the most simple factchecks.
      • The alternative to plagerism appears to be journalists who take ideas posted elsewhere and re-write them without any fact checking, losing the nuance of the article and frequently the point. This is what happens with a lot of tech articles, where reporters talk about how, for example, the Xbox 360 has been "recalled" when the source material said "unavailable." At least when they plagiarize the entire article we're one step closer to the actual investigation.

        We need to demand that Journalists don't just r
    • There is probably quite a bit of plagiarism that goes undetected in the media, especially relating to blogs. It seems that the mass media catches onto stories that first break in the blogosphere, and I wouldn't be surprised if some print articles are lifted from well thought out blog posts.

      Of course, this is no reason to entirely discredit the mass media, I would like to hope that 99.99% of them practice responsible journalism, but I am sure there is that .01% that makes the whole group look bad.
    • Ever seen the plagarism of the year awards? http://5thnovember.blogspot.com/2005/12/and-winner -is.html [blogspot.com]

      The winner was the Daily Mail which made a two page spread of someones blog and passed it off as their own work.
    • I'm sure there's plagiarism going on, but there's never been a more dangerous time to do it. It's much easier to cross-check articles on the Internet for plagiarism than for any previous medium. Educators have already access to a variety of tools [educause.edu] to catch cheaters.

    • Re:How much more that we don't know about? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15 2006, @11:43AM (#14475961)
      This really makes one wonder how much additional plagiarism is present in the articles and reports presented by the mass media on a daily basis.

      As the media spokesperson for the company I work for, we have stopped permitting any written media stories without requiring final draft review authority (meaning the media entity may not run the story with our quotes unless we have reviewed the final draft and approve it for release). We also tape all interviews and review quotes for accuracy with the recorded conversation. Television and radio pieces are less critical because they use source material for quotes.

      We found that the frequency of errors and outright fabrication by print reporters was so high that we had to put in a policy to prevent recurrances. Things like comments attacking competitors which were never made (other than in the reporter's head - who defended it by claiming the quote was a "composite that reflected the mood of the interview") to articles that had dozens of inaccuracies - some material and some not - all drove us to lay down the rules.

      A couple of suggestions I'd make for anyone that ever deals with the media:
      1. Never, ever, go "off the record." They'll still use it and apologize later.
      2. If you're not the official spokesperson, simply say nothing other than "Let me call my boss" and pass it along. They will burn you with quotes to advance their career.
      3. Record every interview! Tell them you are recording it and you will compare the quotes with the recording. Tell them the company attorneys make you do that. This might make them be a little less loose with their writing.
      4. If they're not recording but rather writing on a note pad, ask them to read back your quotes to you. Pros don't mind. If they do mind, you don't have a pro and need to take warning.

      Bad reporting can hurt you or your company. I've seen good people fired for making the mistake of believing they were off the record. While there are some professionals in this field, the culture has gotten very competitive and ruthless as most of the papers have suffered major financial declines in the past decade. You either come up with hot stories or lose your job. So what if that means taking things out of context, making up quotes, or putting stuff on the record that was confidential.

      • Re:How much more that we don't know about? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by raju1kabir (251972) on Sunday January 15 2006, @01:19PM (#14476322) Homepage
        As the media spokesperson for the company I work for, we have stopped permitting any written media stories without requiring final draft review authority (meaning the media entity may not run the story with our quotes unless we have reviewed the final draft and approve it for release).

        The effect of which would be to limit "authorized" quotes from your company's staff to trade rags and the Podunk County Weekly Advertiser. No reputable newspaper would submit to those conditions unless you were providing the scoop of the century.

        And of course you cannot prevent any newspaper from running any quote they happen to come by.

      • Can you tell us which news outlets have agreed to give a company's PR person final approval authority for their reporting? I'd like to know so I can make sure to avoid them at all costs. Thanks.

      • Like Swift Dead (Score:5, Insightful)

        by quokkapox (847798) <quokkapox@gmail.com> on Sunday January 15 2006, @11:16AM (#14475861)
        Often newspapers reprint AP content without any fact-checking or error correction. Check out the recent AP content related to Albert Hoffman. Many newspaper articles regurgitated [cnn.com] the AP wire article which referenced a bogus name for LSD, "Like Swift Dead". Anybody ever heard that before? Nope. Even Google had no references to it, which could easily have been checked by the original AP reporter or any of the chorus of mass-media parrots who copied/reprinted the erroneous article.

        Reminds me of Cyber Monday.

        People have to learn to evaluate what they read critically and decide how believable it is. I'm not very optimistic about this happening in the U.S.

  • How did they know? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How did they know that his articles weren't being plagurized by Wikipedia?

    • Re:How did they know? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Strolls (641018) on Sunday January 15 2006, @11:44AM (#14475963)
      How did they know that his articles weren't being plagurized by Wikipedia?
      If you read the fine articles lined to in the summary you'll see the dates are pretty damning. One of the comparisons indicates plagiarism from an article printed in another newspaper a month or so previous to the Honolulu Star Bulletin's publication.
  • Entertainment columnists are often looked down upon by their peers in the journalism trade. While I have never gotten a single answer for why, the reasons often revolve around them covering issues that don't really matter, or which take very little understanding to cover sufficiently.

    It may be similar to the situation in the corporate IT world, where Visual BASIC programmers are often looked down upon by those using Java or COBOL, for instance.

  • Well, maybe "sad" wasn't my first choice of words (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kamapuaa (555446) on Sunday January 15 2006, @10:42AM (#14475701) Homepage
    Wikipedia isn't an organization, it's a website. The people who caught the plagiarism weren't employees of Wikipedia, or acting on behalf of the Wikipedia Foundation, why should Wikipedia be given credit? This is just another instance of Wikipedia supporters having a chip on their shoulder against the established media - I loved the righteous tone of indignation, you can almost forget just how commonly Wikipedia articles plagiarize printed sources.
    • Well, speaking as an administrator, a long-time contributor, and a historian, Wikipedia doesn't plagiarize all that often, because anything identified as a copyright violation gets deleted. If you were familiar with Wikipedia at all you would know that our rules on images are strict enough to cause plenty of grumbling and bitterness. Thanks for spouting off without knowing the facts though.
    • Wikipedia isn't an organization, it's a website. The people who caught the plagiarism weren't employees of Wikipedia, or acting on behalf of the Wikipedia Foundation.

      Wikipedia is a community. The people who caught the cheating were acting on behalf of the community and identify strongly with same. Wikipedia Foundation is a non-profit corporation setup to conduct legal business on behalf of the community.

      why should Wikipedia be given credit?

      The people who did the work are part of the community, drew on

      • There are so many problems with that post that it's insane.

        If you notice plagiarism in the mainstream media, you are powerless.

        Yeah, I mean the Sun Bulletin just shrugged off all of the reports of plagiarism in this case. I wish they had done something to remedy the situation.

        Oh wait, they did.

        Therefore, Wikipedia is superior to the mainedia.

        How does this follow? There are so many other axes than just how difficult it is to plagarize. Accuracy. Bias. Timeliness.

        Second, even in the category of plagarism, I'd

  • Is it really that hard... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dbolger (161340) on Sunday January 15 2006, @10:43AM (#14475705) Homepage
    ...to use babelfish to translate the wikipedia article from English to Chinese, back again, and fix the grammer? The guy deserves to be fired. Sure, for plagarism, but more importantly for being stupid enough to get caught, imho.

  • should have added the {{plagiarism}} tag (Score:5, Funny)

    by xIcemanx (741672) on Sunday January 15 2006, @10:43AM (#14475709)
    This article is [[plagiarism]]. You can [[help]] Wikipedia by [[reporting it]].

  • Sooo What You're Saying Is... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jeffmeden (135043) on Sunday January 15 2006, @10:44AM (#14475711) Homepage Journal
    "Sadly, though the Star-Bulletin has admitted to the plagiarism, they failed to publicly acknowledge that Wikipedia was responsible for bringing this situation to light."

    That the story of a journalist plagiarizing wikipedia, that was revealed on wikipedia, was plagiarized by the Star-Bulletin, the paper that employed the plagiarizing writer?

    Irony meter broken!!! Alert Alert!!!

  • What Plagiarism is: (Score:5, Informative)

    by saskboy (600063) on Sunday January 15 2006, @10:45AM (#14475722) Homepage Journal
    Plagiarism is a form of academic malpractice. It refers to the use of another's information, language, or writing, when done without proper acknowledgment of the original source. Plagiarism is not necessarily the same as copyright infringement, which occurs when one violates copyright law. Like most terms from the area of intellectual property, plagiarism is a concept of the modern age and not really applicable to medieval or ancient works.
    This [wikipedia.org] post would be plagairism had I not included this link, for instance. Perhaps because the journalist wrote for a printed newspaper, and couldn't get hyperlinks to work on paper, he thought it was better to include no hyperlink at all. He thought wrong.
  • The ironic part is that this was probably discovered while the Wikipedia editor was looking for sources to improve the article. Wikipedia would have been Ok with it if only the Star had complied with the GFDL rules.

  • Paligarsm ?? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Delifisek (190943) on Sunday January 15 2006, @10:50AM (#14475743) Homepage
    You mean select with mouse
    then press ctrl + c
    then press ctrl + v

    But, but, isnt that feature of Windows ?
    • <clippy>It looks like you are trying to do "research" (clippy winks). Would you like to use MSN Search to find more (clippy raises an eyebrow) material?</clippy>

      By the way, I saw a similar "clippy" joke somewhere before...hrm, it might have even been on slashdot. I'll consider that a cite, and welcome our new plaguirism overlords.

  • Referrences missing? No, not really. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tinfoil (109794) on Sunday January 15 2006, @11:09AM (#14475829) Homepage Journal
    Sadly, though the Star-Bulletin has admitted to the plagiarism, they failed to publicly acknowledge that Wikipedia was responsible for bringing this situation to light."

    From one of the stories linked in TFA [starbulletin.com] (pops):

    CORRECTION Saturday, December 24, 2005

    A portion of a review of the television show "Secrets of the Black Box: Aloha Flight 243" was taken verbatim from the Web site reference.com. The material was originally published in the online encyclopedia wikipedia.com. The article, on Page D6 Thursday, failed to attribute the information to either source.

    Please see the applicable Corrections Page for more information.
    • Sadly, though the Star-Bulletin has admitted to the plagiarism, they failed to publicly acknowledge that Wikipedia was responsible for bringing this situation to light."

      Read that again. Then, read what you posted.

      A portion of a review of the television show "Secrets of the Black Box: Aloha Flight 243" was taken verbatim from the Web site reference.com. The material was originally published in the online encyclopedia wikipedia.com. The article, on Page D6 Thursday, failed to attribute the information

  • ...and it won't be the last time (Score:5, Insightful)

    by embrown (923302) on Sunday January 15 2006, @11:38AM (#14475947)
    It wouldn't surprise me if more instances of plagiarism surfaced for two reasons 1. technology allows for better watchdogs and 2. at the most basic level, plagiarism isn't dealt with harshly enough.

    I graduated with a journalism degree a few years ago and my experience truly left me disturbed regarding the issue of plagiarism. The cardinal rule presented in every single class was that plagiarism would not only get you a failing grade, but expulsion from the program and university. Students who catch another plagiarizing are, by the university's honor code, required to turn them in. Unfortunately, few professors followed up with any sort of retribution when a student was caught.

    In one instance, a web project by a classmate was blatantly plagiarized. There were several style, spelling and grammatical errors which would have caught the attention of any veteran journalist/editor, let alone a student. Sure enough, when text in the project was Googled, two instances came up: the project and the source it was copied from (errors included). When it was brought to the attention of the professor, it was immediately dismissed and no action was taken.

    And that's not the only case... another professor (ironically, the one who taught Journalism Ethics) shared how in previous semesters she caught roughly a quarter of the class plagiarizing their term papers.

    If plagiarism isn't taken care of at the most basic level, why should we expect it to cease? What would make any aspiring journalist who got away with plagiarizing an article feel the need to adhere to ethical reporting?

    • Having graduated with my degree in journalism about nine months ago, I couldn't agree with you more that plagerism runs rampant in many, many school programs for future newspaper writers. I think half the problem is the hazy, self-centered, mostly situational ethics structure that even mainstream journalists still strongly adhere to. As far as I can tell, there are no absolutes when it comes to ethics in journalism. This seems to encourage thinking like, "If I can get away with it, why not take the easy

      • Re:...and it won't be the last time (Score:4, Insightful)

        by winwar (114053) on Sunday January 15 2006, @03:50PM (#14477212)
        "Usually what happens is that the professor takes the opportunity of a first offense to scare the snot out of you. Second offenses get you turfed."

        Speaking as someone who has lectured at the college level and who has had discussions with other professors, I doubt second offenses would "get you turfed." Generally the first offense MIGHT result in the professor scaring the hell out of you. In fact some places make it hard to do this. At a certain large university in Columbus, OH all plagiarism is supposed to be reported to academic affairs (or whatever they are called these days). Individual professors are technically not allowed to punish plagiarism or cheating.

        The result? Plagiarism is rampant. Unless it is obvious, nothing happens, because it is a major PITA to report it. In general those who do it get graded poorly, mostly because the copied work sucks....

  • I thought "Love-Wikipedia" day was Tuesday (Score:5, Funny)

    by pitc (557530) on Sunday January 15 2006, @11:38AM (#14475948)
    So today slashdot loves wikipedia? I'll be looking forward to the "Wikipedia Kills Baby Seals" article tomorrow.
  • I thought an encyclopedia was full of facts, and that facts held only extremely weak copyright in the first place. The reason (as I understand it) being that it's better to encourage people to restate a fact than to play "telephone", making slight adjustments to the known-to-be true wording each time it is repeating.

    I'm not familiar with this case in detail so I may be missing some degree to which this was just gross infringement, but in general the core issue in plagiarism seems to me to be "citation" and not "copying" per se. That is, there may be places where copying is fine with citation and not otherwise.

    Wikipedia introduces a new level of subtlety into this, it seems to me: "edit history". An edit history is not a citation. It allows you to lazily recover where a problem was introduced, but it is not a source citation. People are presumably asked not to include copyrighted material, but probably so are paid reporters. When a paid reporter does so, he gets fired, and even then it reflects on the organization that paid him. When the wiki gets bad info, they may try to lock out the contributor (maybe even ineffectually), and yet the wiki does not lose face. It seems to me like it's likely they get off easy here in a way a newspaper doesn't.

    Wikipedia (in its default presentation) doesn't tell me which of its data came from which place. People just make changes and I'm not clear that it's always stated where they get those facts. I'm sure a lot of it must be reviewed and checked, but I don't see where the indication is of which is and which is not. And I don't see how "reviewed for truth" proves their document is free of plagiarism.

    Also, if there's only one real source of information on a topic, but several people each individually filter in parts of that source, it looks like a kind of "presentational laundering" of the original source. Wikipedia can say it's due to all these people, but can it really say that it hasn't grabbed large amounts of data from other sources?

    I'm not really trying to make accusations here. I imagine Wikipedia is very upstanding in their goals and practices. It just seems a bit odd to me to say that an author must cite a source whose entire nature seems to be, paraphrased by me, general knowledge shared among lots of people. When I say 2+2=4, I don't cite a source (even though I probably learned it from some) for pretty much the same reason.

    If instead of this article that got in trouble at a newspaper, it had been a wikimedia of some kind, where the parts were individually stripped in from well-meaning people in smaller parts, would it still be in the same degree of trouble? Is the problem "what was done" or just "how it was done"?

    Thinking aloud here about the general philosophy as much as this specific incident. I guess I just wonder if the standards people are being held to are at all fair. (And even if the answer will turn out to be that the standards are fair, it doesn't seem to hurt anything to ask the question once in a while.)
    • I'm not really trying to make accusations here. I imagine Wikipedia is very upstanding in their goals and practices. It just seems a bit odd to me to say that an author must cite a source whose entire nature seems to be, paraphrased by me, general knowledge shared among lots of people.

      The problem isn't really that the Star Bulletin writer (Tim Ryan) used the facts without attribution or citation. The information is readily available from a large number of alternate sources, and so might be (with a bit of a stretch) considered 'common knowledge'. It might have lent more weight to the article to be able to say, "According to an NTSA report on the accident..." or something of that sort, but I guess that would be overkill for an entertainment column.

      The issue was that Ryan copied substantial passages verbatim without attribution or quotation marks to indicate that the material came from another source. Someone (actually, several someones) at Wikipedia put in a fair bit of effort to convert factual information into an easily-readable and cohesive narrative form. By directly lifting the text, Ryan passed off their work as his own. The plagiarism Tim Ryan committed was in his failure to acknowledge the source of 'his' words, not in his failure to credit the source of his facts.

      I am a regular Wikipedia editor, and I agree with you that Wikipedia doesn't always catch plagiarism either. However, we do take action against editors who reuse material from other sources (images or text) inappropriately. In general, we're usually pretty good at detecting when a lump of text appears that seems suspiciously well written, or that doesn't quite fit with the rest of an article.

  • How do we know? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mr_zorg (259994) on Sunday January 15 2006, @02:01PM (#14476560) Homepage
    How do we know he's not the one who wrote the Wikipedia articles in question?

    • Re:irony (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Daniel Dvorkin (106857) * on Sunday January 15 2006, @11:26AM (#14475895) Homepage Journal
      The idea that Wikipedia is a "plague" is nonsense, being pushed by a few curmudgeons who can't get their mind around the idea that students might be able to work more efficiently by looking up secondary sources online than by reading equivalent sources in the library. There have always been students who retyped encyclopedia articles and presented the result as their own work; sure, it's easier to cut'n'paste from Wikipedia than to type in a dead-tree encyclopedia article by hand, but it's not so much easier as to justify the reaction Wikipedia is getting.

      The real problem is students, even at the college level, regarding any secondary source as sufficient research. I've said before that one of the best teachers I ever had, my American History teacher in high school, did the class an enormous favor with his source policy, which seemed Draconian at the time: "If you cite an encyclopedia article in your paper, no matter how good the rest of the paper is, you get an F on the assignment." An encylopedia -- any encyclopedia -- is a place to start looking for information, but unless you're just looking up something quickly to satisfy your own curiosity, it's never a place to finish.
    • From the article: "[...] a 21 year veteran [...]". Do you see the word "old" in there anywhere? No. His career was twenty one years old, but presumably he himself was significantly older.

    • Re:How do you plagiarize from Wikipedia anyway? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Gallech (804178) on Sunday January 15 2006, @02:00PM (#14476545) Homepage
      >How do you plagiarize from Wikipedia anyway?

      As was mentioned earlier in this thread, plagiarism does not directly relate to copyright. Any time you use someone else's words or thinking with the intent to imply that *you* were the author of those words or thoughts, you are a plagiarist. This differs from copyright, which has very specific legal meaning.

      To be more specific: copyright can be proven or disproven in court. Plagiarism might not be provable in court. But if you are a professional writer (scientist, newspaper columnist, etc), and are caught obviously using someone else's material, even if not in a legal sense, your career is likely to be in jeopardy.

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