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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."
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.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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?
w00t
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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 one of the school's professors. His work was plagiarized by another revered author. That author's reputation is now forever tarnished by this act.
It's a shame that other places pay plagiarism only lip service, but at least that's not the case everywhere.
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!"
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.
~Idarubicin
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 calling it plagiarism is like calling sharing stealing.
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 the resources of the community, and want the community to get credit. I don't see a problem with this.
This is just another instance of Wikipedia supporters having a chip on their shoulder against the established media.
Agreed... the tone of the story submission did sound unprofessionally indignant.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction