Alleged Plagiarism In Chris Anderson's New Book 138
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by
Soulskill
from the hyperlinks-don't-stick-to-dead-trees dept.
from the hyperlinks-don't-stick-to-dead-trees dept.
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.'"
Time Warp! (Score:4, Interesting)
What is really interesting is that even though this article is 140 years old, they still ended the soft articles on a light note (maybe I notice this because the Onion mocks it so often?). The last few sentences:
I related to Mr. Lacoume the conversation which I had overheard between the old Frenchman and the waiter, and asked him if he had many discontented customers. "Oh yes," he replied laughing, "there are at least a dozen old fellows who come here every day, take one fifteen cent drink, eat a dinner which would cost them $1 in a restaurant, and then complain that the beef is tough or the potatoes water." Mr. Lacoume confirmed the statement that thousands of people in New-Orleans live on free lunches.
Plagiarism (Score:2, Interesting)
The term is largely meaningless if you accept all works are derivative.
Seems its only use is as writer's equivalent of gorilla feces-pitching.
Only one way to respond (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Inability to cite web??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why shouldn't you use information from Wikipedia with no cited sources?
I hope you're being sarcastic. If you have a source, then you have accountability. You may not be able to sue someone or have them arrested, but you at least have a name, and a person's reputation being staked on the accuracy of the work. In the case of Wikipedia, you MAY have a citation.
Why can't Wikipedia be the source?
Think of it this way. Someone publishes a paper or a college level manual, or conducts an interview. The person is the primary source of information on what they did. As such, which would you rather have, their account, or a summary of their account? Wikipedia is, at best, secondhand information.
.
Don't get me wrong, I use Wikipedia all the time, but if I were doing a research paper, I would use it only to get a grasp on the basics of the subject.
Does the same go for citing from Encyclopedia Britannica?
Yes.
Re:Inability to cite web??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikipedia at face value is just as valid as a source as any other collection of research. Wikipedia takes information from sources and condenses and analyses them for the reader, just like any other encyclopedia. It is perfectly viable as a quality source, as long as you take into account the quality of the sources cited by each encyclopedic article.
For example, if you are writing a "general knowledge" sort of essay/book/whatever, directly sourcing Wikipedia is probably fine unless the cited sources of the wikipedia article are complete hogwash. Usually Wikipedia itself notes these sorts of issues, but you should at least peruse them yourself.
However, if you are conducting academic research, Wikipedia is probably at best going to give you a basic understanding of the subject and point you in the direction of some research sources. It should probably not be used as a source itself. There are, however, a few very high quality editors in some of the subjects, so even this shouldn't be completely discounted.
It sounds like Scott Adams used the Wikipedia snippets primarily as the former, in sidebars as general clarifications for the uninformed - something encyclopedias are very, very good at. It would be perfectly acceptable to source Wikipedia on this, especially if Wikipedia's sources are confusing compared to the article.
Basically, anything can be a valid source - hell you could source a comic strip and it would be valid. What matters is your purpose, how you use the sourced information, and the quality of the source you are using. This goes for ALL forms of research. Nothing should be discounted simply because of where it comes from, but on the other hand nothing should be accepted for no reason other than the source.