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."

Comments

Outrage!

[Aron S-T]

Is it just me, or is no one else out there outraged by this story. Not at what Tim Ryan did but by the disgusting, low-life behavior of the Wikipedia "community."

First, lets put the term "plagiarism" in a bit of perspective. Ever since the first ape began telling stories, humanoids have been copying ideas and stories verbatim one from another. Hell, half of the stories in the Bible, which millions of people around the world believe is "The Word of God" lifted huge chunks verbatim from Mesopatamian and Egyptian legends and myths without any attribution. In a type of reverse plagerism many authors attributed their writing to ancient holy men in order to gain immortality for their words. o false attribution or lack of attribution was certainly not considered immoral or unethical until very recently. It goes hand in hand with our worship of property above all other human values (and that is one idolatrous practice that gets worse with every passing day).
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And even today, many of the so-called "works of art" the unwashed /. masses waste their childhood and adult life on, are totally plagerized. The writers/directors lift their key ideas, themes, protagonists and plots from other works and writers (who did a far better job presenting them). Even truly original modern artists like Gaiman, Miller and Moore are strongly indebted and make free use of the art and ideas of others. In fact, that is a Good Thing and they will tell you so themselves. Gaiman's "American Gods" has no footnotes (I wish it did so I could trace back to their original source many of the myths and gods he mentioned). Is he worthy of condemnation as a plagerist? Fuck no.

I understand to a certain extent in certain situations, why people get their panties in a twist when someone tries to pass someone else' work off as their own. Yes it should be common courtesy in a research environment to cite your sources. And if you lift verbatim the core thesis of your paper without proper attribution, then of course you should not be given any credit for your work. But to be enraged about a few unattributed lines in a paper or book - give me a fucking break! And considering how little truly interesting/original stuff gets written in academia, I would attribute the holy self-righteousness plagerism or alleged plagerism causes, to over-inflated and insecure egos. There are very rare occassions where I would say plagerism is worthy of the uproar it causes.

In the case at hand, I wouldn't even use the word plagerism. We're not talking about "original" work here. Sure a bunch of lil (losers in search of a life TM) people, who have nothing better to do with themselves, wast^H^H^H^Hspend hours of their obviously worthless time gathering other people's original ideas and thoughts and putting them down on a wiki page ("Gee I wrote the page on Princess Leia ORGANA (holy fuck, how utterly loserish can you be that you make the pedantic distinction between TWO Princess Leias). And true I wanked off about a hundred times over the picture of her in the bikini which I lifted from somewhere without permission, BUT that's cool because I have a standard Wikipedia disclaimer that this is PROBABLY fair use). Maybe now I can finally lose my virginity.") I have no doubt that Tim Ryan innocently related to Wikipedia as a public domain commons and so didn't think twice about taking factual material from it. And you know what? He was perfectly right to do so.

But a bunch of $%$$%$&^ with over-inflated egos took it upon themselves to destroy someone's career and life. Hey guys, remember, Tim Ryan is a man with a family and a job who works hard at what he does and has for 21 years. But in these days when people are expendable, his corporate bosses decided its not worth the trouble and bother fighting off the enraged wikipedia hordes, so they ditched the man for the alleged "crime" of not attributing that he got a few FACTS (not original ideas but FACTS) from some site that collects facts and publishes them anonymously. GIVE ME A FUCKING BREA