Wikipedia Plagiarism Ends Journalist's Career

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."

However

[Anonymous Coward]

The new WikiStar-Bulletin has been edited to reflect this fact.

How much more that we don't know about?

[CyricZ]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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:Agreed

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, you're modded +5, your parent just +4. Plagiarism does pay off.

Re:Indeed.

[dangitman]

No, you are wrong. This definitely makes me contemplate the amount of additional plagiarism present in the editorials and articles published by the mainstream media every day.

Re:Indeed.

[Crayon Kid]

But why is it such an issue? Plagiarism from Wikipedia, that is. Surely, from a moral standpoint it's not "right", but legally? Who owns Wikipedia copyright? Wikimedia Foundation? All the contributors, collectively? Just the ones that produced the current version? Why?

Who decided this? Who's to tell us the contents in Wikipedia right now doesn't breach copyright elsewhere? (And statistically thinking, chances are that it does, which is why we're never gonna see a printed version unless the publisher wants t

Re:Indeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

re-thinking plagarism and written communication

[drDugan]

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

Re:Indeed.

[ceoyoyo]

Universities have had policies on self plagiarism for a long time. Fortunately my high school didn't have such a coherent policy... I figured if the teacher was going to give the same assignment year after year why shouldn't I hand in the same work for it? After all, if my grade 9 poetry book could still draw 99% in grade 11, why not?

Re:Indeed.

[Yartrebo]

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:Indeed.

[ceoyoyo]

I've always thought it was odd myself. It's pretty much standard policy in universities though.

I guess the idea is that you're presenting something as original work, when it is actually pre-existing work (though still YOUR pre-existing work). Sort of like if you painted a picture for someone and told them it was an original when actually you had copied one of your older paintings.

The dictionary.com definition defines it as copying someone else's work though.

Re:How much more that we don't know about?

[A beautiful mind]

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.

Not going to investigate? Please plagiarize.

[cgenman]

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

Re:How much more that we don't know about?

[TedCheshireAcad]

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.

Re:How much more that we don't know about?

[pcgamez]

Sure, mass media does catch on to stories posted on the net, but they are usually 2-3 days behind (and often 4-5 behind Slashdot).

Re:How much more that we don't know about?

[Ghostx13]

I often read things on Fark days before I read them on slashdot. If it's not directly related to science or technology news I can understand it. But it's pretty sad when Fark scoops slashdot on something that would be of keen intrest to the slashdot crowd by a couple of days.

Re:How much more that we don't know about?

[Richard_at_work]

While not plagarism, I read both Slashdot and BBC News [slashdot.org] daily and its often very surprising the number of BBC News articles that pop up on subjects right after the same story is covered on Slashdot, often with a similiar slant to it. I keep thinking that their tech editor is a slashdotter.

Re:How much more that we don't know about?

[Tony Hoyle]

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.

Re:How much more that we don't know about?

[gol]

i admit i'm no expert on this, but I understood that most press organisations just take newswire reports and alter them in minor ways to create their stories. thus, plagiarism seems to be part of their job, if you know what I mean. true, they do pay for the newswire text, wheras this guy didn't pay for the right to reproduce wikipedia content, but the i would argue that the mindset in the press is one of "copying is ok"

Re:How much more that we don't know about?

[jalefkowit]

When a newspaper takes a story off the wire, it is generally credited as such. Therefore, it is not plagiarism, as the paper is not claiming the story came from their own original reporting.

Look in your local paper to see what I mean. Stories that come off the AP wire usually have "Associated Press" after the author's name on the byline. Stories that the paper's staff wrote will carry their own blurb, which can vary from paper to paper. Looking at today's Washington Post, for example, I see "Washington

Re:How much more that we don't know about?

[timeOday]

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?

[trentblase]

Man, I thought that the .pdf extension would be enough of a warning. Do you seriouly go around clicking links on slashdot without checking the url?

Re:How much more that we don't know about?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

[raju1kabir]

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.

Re:How much more that we don't know about?

[raju1kabir]

The three daily papers that we encounter do not have a problem with allowing us to review the quotes.

Quite possibly, but that's not what you wrote previously and what I responded to (quoted below):

meaning the media entity may not run the story with our quotes unless we have reviewed the final draft and approve it for release

To me this says that you are demanding to approve the story itself if it contains any quotes you have supplied, and if you don't like it, you will somehow withdraw the quotes

Re:How much more that we don't know about?

[raju1kabir]

umm just about any company that would think of having stock has a policy of DO NOT TALK TO THE MEDIA WITHOUT CLEARING WITH MEDIA RELATIONS and yes they will approve everything that is said (or corp legal will be "talking" to the media) im sure that there is several meters of regs that need to be followed.

Yes, of course, the point is that once it gets into the newspaper's hands the company has lost control and the paper is very unlikely to give any control back.

Re:How much more that we don't know about?

[jalefkowit]

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.

Re:How much more that we don't know about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you totally fucking illiterate? The AC makes the point, again and again, that they're reviewing ONLY quotes, to ensure they're accurate, and that they have NO influence/editorial power over the remaining content of the articles.

Re:How much more that we don't know about?

[cagle_.25]

It's not just strict plagarism of content. Mass media unquestionably look to each other to decide which stories are "hot." Haven't you ever been amazed that, with the 6 billion+ people in the world, the major news outlets all seem to converge on the same stories to report? Compare:

The Washington Post [washingtonpost.com]
CNN [cnn.com]
The New York Times [nytimes.com]

I recognize that the life of Joe Schmoe might be less important than, say, airstrikes in Pakistan. Nevertheless, I would expect truly indepedent and free-thinking press staffs to h

computers are finding these

[peter303]

On one hand computers are giving authors temptation to plagarize; same search engines discover plagarism. Its not hard to plug in phrases from on-line Google News to find other news articles as copies.

I have not heard of systematic studies of professional plagarism among journalists. A group reported to the science magazine Nature a study of electronic academic journals. It was not a high amount, but not a zero amount. I recall it was like about a half-percent xeno-plagarism (copying anothers text)

Like Swift Dead

[quokkapox]

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.

Re:Like Swift Dead

[ceejayoz]

That's the point of the Associated Press, though. It's not plagarism, the newspapers pay to be able to run AP content so they don't have to have 300 international news reporters for a small town paper.

Re:Like Swift Dead

[daVinci1980]

The irony of your post, and its being rated to +5, Insightful is not lost on me.

As another poster mentioned, the purpose of the Associated Press is to exist as frontline reporters for the various news organizations that link from it. But don't take my word for it, read directly from the AP. [ap.org]

Papers have bought a service from the AP, that is, to provide content for them that would be prohibitive for them to get themselves. They expect, as part of that purchase, that the AP has error and fact checked the materi

Re:Like Swift Dead

[quokkapox]

Fine, but publishing random crap is not a good thing.

The Associated Press is demonstrably not the infallible rock of reliable facts which many assume it to be. Their technology articles are also often very iffy.

But the average person will believe whatever they read and hear on cnn and on the Net and in the paper.

And people criticize Wikipedia...

Not flamebait

[quokkapox]

Google is a fairly good (but obviously imperfect and incomplete) index of the current knowledge base of literate humans with access to the Internet.

Before the AP article that mentioned "Like Swift Dead", that phrase (in quotes) returned zero results. That means nobody who ever talked about LSD mentioned "Like Swift Dead" on a web page that got indexed by Google. That's all it means.

There is now a Wikipedia article where the facts can be hashed out and the prior existence of the term can be debated a

Re:Not flamebait

[Dun Malg]

Before the AP article that mentioned "Like Swift Dead", that phrase (in quotes) returned zero results. That means nobody who ever talked about LSD mentioned "Like Swift Dead" on a web page that got indexed by Google. That's all it means.

That's all it means, but that actually says a lot. "The web" being an essentially uncensored medium, drug slang is exhaustively covered. If a slang term for a drug doesn't come up in google, I'd wager any amount you'd name that it's not a term in common usage.

Also, just

Re:Not flamebait

[quokkapox]

"The web" being an essentially uncensored medium, drug slang is exhaustively covered.

This statement deserves emphasis for linguists everywhere.

How did they know?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:How did they know?

[Strolls]

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 not look up to.

[CyricZ]

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.

Re:Entertainment columnists not look up to.

[BoomerSooner]

How the hell can someone programming COBOL look down on anyone. I'd rather program in QuickBasic. Horrible, horrible language. I'd rather do the whole damn thing in JCL.

Look Down?

[Gonoff]

can someone programming COBOL look down on anyone

Perhaps it is because COBOL programmers tend to produce code and many VB programmers p*ss about in a GUI?

Re:Entertainment columnists not look up to.

[Oligonicella]

Do you know what JCL is? If so, please explain how you would do the "whole damn thing" in JCL?

Re:Entertainment columnists not look up to.

[jalefkowit]

A lot of this ill repute comes from the low standards that are attached to "entertainment journalism". Much of what passes for entertainment journalism is just repackaged PR -- stories fed to the correspondent by a celebrity's publicist, who then reprints it without investigation. A good journalist is supposed to check facts and corroborate stories with multiple sources, but in entertainment journalism assertions by a celebrity's "camp" ("TOM SPEAKS: KATIE IS THE MOST AWESOMEST WOMAN EVER") are considered

Well, maybe "sad" wasn't my first choice of words

[kamapuaa]

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.

Re:Well, maybe "sad" wasn't my first choice of wor

[chazzf]

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.

Re:Well, maybe "sad" wasn't my first choice of wor

[kamapuaa]

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

And if you were familiar with Wikipedia at all you would know that plagiarism runs rampant. Give me a break, you really think having a rule against plagiarism is a full-proof system? Your post borders on nonsense.

Re:Well, maybe "sad" wasn't my first choice of wor

[firewrought]

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

Re:Well, maybe "sad" wasn't my first choice of wor

[EvanED]

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

Re:Well, maybe "sad" wasn't my first choice of wor

[1u3hr]

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.

Read the linked articles; you find that the Sun did try to brush it off; then gave the reporter a brief suspension, before finally firing him; all only because of the attention competing newspapers were giving.

Re:Well, maybe "sad" wasn't my first choice of wor

[kamapuaa]

Perhaps you are Tim Ryan's friend?

It's a Conspiracy!!! C, O, N, Spiracy!

Is it really that hard...

[dbolger]

...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.

Re:Is it really that hard...

[3dWarlord]

It truly is that difficulty uses babelfish to translate the wikipedia article again from English to Chinese, behind, with repairs grammer? The person deserves is dismissed. Definitely, is plagarism, but heavier important place for is enough stupidly caught, imho.

Re:Is it really that hard...

[peterpi]

Good effort, but you forgot to run the spell checker. Your post has the same spelling mistake (grammer) as the parent.

Re:Is it really that hard...

[TedCheshireAcad]

Is it really that hard......to use babelfish to translate the wikipedia article from English to Chinese, back again, and fix the grammer?

Apparently not as hard as it is to spell 'grammar' correctly.

Re:Is it really that hard to understand ethics?

[Kenneth Stephen]

Why is it that you consider getting caught to be the greater sin? Have you been watching too many heist movies and they have given you the impression that crime is ok as long as you dont get caught?

Re:Is it really that hard...

[ceoyoyo]

Is it that hard to simply rewrite the article? These guys are professional journalists, right? Presumably they should be able to read the Wikipedia article then rewrite it in their own words and have it come out BETTER than the one written by Random Joe on the Internet. This behaviour is worthy of elementary school students who are too lazy to paraphrase the encyclopedia and instead just copy it outright, then get a lecture, a zero and their parents called and never do it again. Until they graduate jour

Dear moderators.

[Inoshiro]

I do not see why any post that is not very insightful and also incorrectly spells the word grammar (which no e has ever been involved with) should be +5.

Perhaps you could make a case for +3. I would certainly mod this kind of tripe down if I were you.

Re:Is it really that hard...

[TERdON]

Assuming it was he (and only he - on one else) who wrote the content of the WP article, he would be on the safe side, yes. But WP articles that are only edited by one person aren't very usual...

should have added the {{plagiarism}} tag

[xIcemanx]

This article is [[plagiarism]]. You can [[help]] Wikipedia by [[reporting it]].

Sooo What You're Saying Is...

[jeffmeden]

"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:

[saskboy]

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.

Re:What Plagiarism is:

[sbaker]

Whilst this certainly is a case of plagiarism, it's slightly unusual in that the material involved was CopyLeft'ed.

Usually, the problem with plagiarism is that copying the material was illegal.

But Wikipedia ALLOWS people to copy articles, parts of articles - or even the whole darned encyclopedia. That's just fine so long as you follow the CopyLeft license in classic OpenSource style. So in this case the problem ISN'T that the material was copied - it was that the reporter didn't provide the required attri

Re:What Plagiarism is:

[hunterx11]

Usually, the legal problem is that copying the material was illegal.

The ethical (and more important) reason is that copying the material was dishonest.

Re:What Plagiarism is:

[p3d0]

Usually, the problem with plagiarism is that copying the material was illegal.

Wrong. Plagiarism does not rest on copyright. You can be granted the right to copy some material, but if you submit it as your own work, it's still plagiarism.

Re:What Plagiarism is:

[Roblimo]

Here's the thing: If my name is on an article, you expect that I wrote the words in it. If I quote a person in an interview, you assume (in my case correctly) that I actually had a conversation with that individual.

If I quote Wikipedia, a news article or any material published elsewhere, I should distinguish the quote from my own words: "An article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on Sept. 21, 2004, said 'blah blah blah,'" or "'Life is sort of like living,' guitarist Juan Renown told interviewer P.R. Rewrite f

Re:I consider your post plagiarism - me too

[saskboy]

You're right, "my" paragraph IS plagiarism, hence the joke when someone loads the link. Self referencial humour, and all that...
But thanks for spoiling it for everyone :-) Just kidding, it's fine that you and others pointed that out. I was tempted to leave the link and explanation out entirely, but then when I posted the explanation, no one would beleive me that was I was joking around. The major flaw in my post though was that I was missing quotation marks, thus giving a reader no idea t

Re:I consider your post plagiarism

[ceoyoyo]

Attribution can come first or last... in the middle is... odd.

If it's a direct quote then the text should be in quotation marks or indented for long quotes. If you're presenting paraphrased information from a source you should reference it. In science it's standard to put the reference mark after the statement.

Re:What Plagiarism is:

[saskboy]

You're quite right, I intentionally left out the quotations for humour's sake. Given the title of "What Plagiarism is" I thought it best to demonstrate through example. The link to Wikipedia was only included so smart people would either clue in on the joke, or call me on my brazenness.

Ironic

[teslatug]

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 ??

[Delifisek]

You mean select with mouse
then press ctrl + c
then press ctrl + v

But, but, isnt that feature of Windows ?

Re:Paligarsm ??

[fwitness]

<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.

How ironic

[Glyn Moody]

This is, of course, precisely how open content like Wikipedia is meant to be used. Maybe the newspaper as well as the journalist has a thing or two [blogspot.com] to learn.

Re:How ironic

[timeOday]

It's not reuse that's bad, it's reuse without attribution. Even the loosey-goosey BSD license requires attribution!

Re:How ironic

[swillden]

This is, of course, precisely how open content like Wikipedia is meant to be used.

No, it isn't, any more than the source code of the Linux kernel is meant to be used in proprietary software. Wikipedia's content is published under the GNU Free Documentation License, and the content is free for any use permitted by that license. Any other use is copyright infringement.

Re:How ironic

[iabervon]

Wikipedia is, in fact, licensed such that it would be completely fine on Wikipedia's end if a newspaper used a paragraph or two, provided they mentioned this fact.

It is a bit of a mystery why newspapers rarely cite sources for background information, and why this is supposed to be a good thing. The background information in an article is, by convention, a brief quotation from an expert who probably wasn't thinking about the topic before the reporter asked, or a reasonable reference work that's been paraphra

Referrences missing? No, not really.

[Tinfoil]

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.

Referrences missing? Um...yes, actually.

[Gothic_Walrus]

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

Wikipedia as reference for papers

[cciRRus]

Just wondering, if you are writing a paper for some conference and you had used information from Wikipedia and you'd like to reference it; so how would you do it? You don't know who are the author(s). Is the following the proper way?

[1] Wikipedia, "Article Title"

Then again, is information from Wikipedia even considered authoritative to be referenced in papers?

Re:Wikipedia as reference for papers

[Rocketship Underpant]

Every modern style guide shows you how to cite web pages. You need at least the precise URL and the date at which you accessed the page.

Re:Wikipedia as reference for papers

[aniefer]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wiki pedia [wikipedia.org]

OK but not best

[peter303]

I might use a Wiki reference for the "background history" section of article, not for the crucial facts.

I'd also accept Wiki sources for an elementary or high school paper if (1) they reassembled them into a new form, (2) add their own interpretation, and (3) wrote down all such web citations (its easy cut and paste a URL, kiddies!). This is basically what many bloggers do. A plagarizing bloggered is going to be ridiculed too.

There is a fine line

[TechForensics]

..between plagiarism and acceptable synthesis. I don't condone plagiarism, but when so many college term papers that merely paraphrase primary sources without attribution are accepted, why are we surprised when similar phenomena crop up in the professional world?

...and it won't be the last time

[embrown]

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?

Different experience

[denebian devil]

I think that the way plagiarism is handled definitely varies from place to place. I went to school with someone who was involved in a paper that was co-authored by about 3 other people. One of them plagiarized and his co-authors didn't catch it. I don't know what happened to the one that did the deed, but the others were forced to do a lot more work on replacement papers, and they weren't even the ones who were at fault.

There was also during my time there a very high profile instance of plagiarism involving

Re:...and it won't be the last time

[ceoyoyo]

Expulsion from a university isn't like expulsion from a high school. In the U it means that no other university will admit you, usually for a period of four or five years.

Everywhere I've ever gone to school plagiarism that's reported is pretty much an automatic expulsion. 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.

I've been part of group projects before where one group member copied directly from the cla

Re:...and it won't be the last time

[winwar]

"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....

Re:...and it won't be the last time...

[rmckeethen]

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

I thought "Love-Wikipedia" day was Tuesday

[pitc]

So today slashdot loves wikipedia? I'll be looking forward to the "Wikipedia Kills Baby Seals" article tomorrow.

Presentation Laundering, and related ethics

[NetSettler]

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.)

Re:Presentation Laundering, and related ethics

[Idarubicin]

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.

Editor contact

[Sivar]

If you feel that the failure to mention Wikipedia is something in need of a correction, note the following from
starbulletin.com/2006/01/15/news/corrections.html [starbulletin.com]

The Star-Bulletin strives to make its news report fair and accurate. If you have a question or comment about news coverage, call Editor Frank Bridgewater at 529-4791 or email him at [e-mail].

How do we know?

[mr_zorg]

How do we know he's not the one who wrote the Wikipedia articles in question?

Eh...

[Per Abrahamsen]

I thought journalists copied from each other all the time.

Re:irony

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.

Re:irony

[Darthmalt]

Been there done that. Course for papers where you are having to write just for the sake of writing and not to necesarilly learn the subject i.e. english class, Wikipedia is great because at the bottom of the page it gives you lots of links you can cite after a quick glance without having to actually read the whole website.

He veteran

[Just Some Guy]

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:You can't expect go get away with this any more

[SvetBeard]

I once had a professor tell the class that our papers weren't graded because of plagarism problems. He continued, "if you're going to plagarize, don't use the internet--it's too easy to check. Go to the library!"

Re:How do you plagiarize from Wikipedia anyway?

[Gallech]

>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.

Re:Meanwhile, back at Wikipedia...

[Elektroschock]

What if Tim wrote the Wikipedia article?