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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."
How did they know that his articles weren't being plagurized by Wikipedia?
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.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
...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.
Java and Cobol programmers have someone to look down upon?
Let's not forget about Wikipedia articles that contain patently false information. That could be a compounding problem - plagiarising false information from Wikipedia.
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 to learn.
Plagiarism has always been a serious problem for writers caught doing it. What has changed is that the internet makes it a lot easier to get caught. In the good old days, if I thought a student had copied something, the best I could do was hope for a confession. Now I just put some of the text into Google, et voila, the smoking gun.
These days, it is almost guaranteed that you will be caught if you make a habit of copying. In the case of tfa, the detection was accidental. On the other hand, if you've irked someone, and they suspect that you might be copying, it's really easy for them to dig up the dirt.
If you notice plagiarism on Wikipedia, you can delete it at once.
If you notice plagiarism in the mainstream media, you are powerless.
Therefore, Wikipedia is superior to the mainedia.
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?
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
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.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
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"
-Drew
..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?
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Media have lost all semblance of journalistic integrity. These days they just rush to be FIRST, but not to be RIGHT. Witness the "12 miners rescued" story. Two girls in a parking lot say everyone was rescued, suddenly everyone is reporting it. 9/11 terrorists came from canada? FOX still can't get that one out of their system.
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?
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 say that the traditional media has an edge. What happens AFTER you delete the plagarism from Wikipedia? Who's to say that the person who added it in the first place won't do it again? Even if you were to ban their userID, what happens if they just register again under another email address? By contrast, do you think that the Sun Bulletin reporter is gonna work in journalism again?
How 'bout this alternate conclusion: People who plagarize in the mainstream media are held to account, therefore the "mainedia" is superior to Wikipedia.
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.)
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
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?
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
At first I used to copy book reports 1 on 1 from the internet and hand them in.
After 1.5 years the teacher learned about Google and I got cought and he freaked out.
So I got the lowest grade possible.
The thing I learned from this event was to always rewrite everything you copy.
I know for sure he checked everything I handed in from that point on, but he failed to catch me again.
God, I always hated reading fiction books!
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.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
No reputable newspaper would submit to those conditions unless you were providing the scoop of the century.
Not true. The three daily papers that we encounter do not have a problem with allowing us to review the quotes. We're not demanding editorial control over the article, but after one daily had an issue with a reporter fabricating quotes and the editor was presented with our tape which the quotes in reference could not be found. It's a reasonable request and their alternative is to not deal with our organization. They can write gossip all day long if they so choose, but won't be permitted to have access to our executives or staff.
Honestly, would you want to work with a paper that refused to validate the quotes? Why would the refuse, if they were a publication of any merit or quality? If an auditor fabricates material, we have recourse. If a vendor delivers defective products, we have recourse. Other than screening the quotes, there is little recourse against defective news organizations (forget litigation - it's ineffective in this case from our experience).
Look at it this way: the process of printing falsehoods and issuing a correction a week later buried inside in tiny print where nobody looks does nothing to remove the harm caused to an organization. And because so many print organizations have given up on objectivity and competence, it is left to media professionals at organizations to unfortunately do the job an editor should.
How do we know he's not the one who wrote the Wikipedia articles in question?
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.
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 in the 1600s) even until the last 20 years it took a lot of work to put a book article, etc out to the world because of centralized publishing. people put a lot of work to get it right. as a couter example, look at all the writing on this page.
in the future vision above - almost no work is required to distribute. written word is literally available as soon as you're done editing. by everyone, for everyone.
so here's the question: as the value of writing goes down beacuse anyone can do it - who will care so much about plagarism? really, plagarism is back to the idea that if you write it first, you "own" it, and everyone else is supposed to give you credit for it. there are two problems with this: (1) not everyone buys into that system, as it doesn't really make that much sense, and (2) just because someone wrote something *first* is no longer going to be the best way to attribute credit for an idea. typically all ideas come from other people anyway.
I think that as we move away from central publishing, over the next 20-50 years the whole concept of writing and plagarism will change radically and plagarism will potentially go away as an idea
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 repeat the news, but investigate it. Taking someone else's ideas or discoveries and reporting them as your own without even running a cursory background check is so common as to be acceptable. It lends credibility to these "facts," even though they might have no basis whatsoever. But if they're not going to spend the time to know what they're talking about, they could at least repeat verbatium from someone who does. That when when the journalist who cribs from the journalist who cribs from the journalist who cribs from you has someone crib from them, the original meaning hasn't been lost in layer upon layer of misinterpretation.
The ______ Agenda
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 to either source.
Those two sentences have no connection whatsoever. The article correction has absolutely nothing to do with the paper running a story on the plagiarism that gives Wikipedia credit for finding said plagiarism.
Goo goo g'joob.
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 way out?" With no solid ethical foundation to support them, is it any wonder that journalists, both new and established ones, so often stray into trouble?
At one point in my journalism ethics class, the question came up, "If you were a photographer working for a newspaper, and you witnessed an accident occuring right in front of you, should you stand there taking pictures, or do you run to help the victims?" Frankly, I couldn't believe that *anyone* would choose the former, but a substancial number of my classmates thought otherwise. Our instructor in that class said she believed that there were merits for either action, and she declined to set any kind of moral standard to follow.
With ethics like that, is it any wonder that journalism keeps getting a black-eye among the public?