Alleged Plagiarism In Chris Anderson's New Book 138
ScorpFromHell writes "Blogger Waldo Jaquith alleges in his blog that Chris Anderson, Wired magazine's editor-in-chief and writer of The Long Tail, has apparently plagiarized content from various sources without attribution for his soon-to-be-published book. 'In the course of reading Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources. ... Most of the passages, but not all, come from Wikipedia.' When questioned about the similar passages, Anderson responded, "All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources... As you'll note, these are mostly on the margins of the book's focus, mostly on historical asides, but that's no excuse. I should have had a better process to make sure the write-through covered all the text that was not directly sourced. I think what we'll do is publish those notes after all, online as they should have been to begin with.'"
Web citing made easy (Score:5, Informative)
Anderson responded, "All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources... "
Zotero [zotero.org], brother: a plugin for Firefox. Makes citing online sources a breeze in any format you care to mention.
Re:It's not plagiarism... (Score:3, Informative)
For example if you were a researcher in some university, and the original author gave you permission to plagiarize and publish his work as yours, it's still plagiarism and it's still wrong, and you should still be punished.
Students get in trouble if they get someone to take their exams for them.
As long as there's misrepresentation going on, even if the original person gave permission for the misrepresentation, it's still a form of deception.
It's pretty simple. The "warning bells should ring" whenever deception is involved.
If the misrepresentation was unintentional then that's different, but then one should not be so careless either especially when creating works in certain fields.
Re:wkipedia guidelines (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Only one way to respond (Score:1, Informative)
TFA shows some pretty damning images of the passages in question.
Moron! MORON! (Score:1, Informative)
You do know what "snappy witticism" means, don't you?
GP knew it was supposed to be a joke but didn't think it was a good one. Parent should be modded down for being a smug, pompous twit who can't read.
Re:Inability to cite web??? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Inability to cite web??? (Score:3, Informative)
He did the wrong thing. But let's not go OTT here.
Re:It's not plagiarism... (Score:4, Informative)
As there is no "-1 Wrong" moderation, I'll respond instead:
"It's still plagiarism even if it's allowed by the original author."
You are wrong. It is called authorized copying. There may also be some legal issues if the author wasn't allowed to get permission.
"Students get in trouble if they get someone to take their exams for them."
This is called cheating. Not plagiarism.
"As long as there's misrepresentation going on, even if the original person gave permission for the misrepresentation, it's still a form of deception."
Deception is not plagiarism. It may be considered unethical but that does not make it plagiarism.
"If the misrepresentation was unintentional then that's different..."
It doesn't matter. Now the penalties, if any, may be lower.
Re:It's not plagiarism... (Score:3, Informative)
Plagiarism has no meaning outside of an academic institution. It's an academic offence, not a legal one[1]. That's why you can't sue someone for doing it.
[1] It may be copyright infringement too - but in that case that's what the law would be interested in.
Re:It's not plagiarism... (Score:3, Informative)
the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.