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

How much more that we don't know about?

[CyricZ]

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.

Re:How much more that we don't know about?

[TedCheshireAcad]

There is probably quite a bit of plagiarism that goes undetected in the media, especially relating to blogs. It seems that the mass media catches onto stories that first break in the blogosphere, and I wouldn't be surprised if some print articles are lifted from well thought out blog posts.

Of course, this is no reason to entirely discredit the mass media, I would like to hope that 99.99% of them practice responsible journalism, but I am sure there is that .01% that makes the whole group look bad.

Re:How much more that we don't know about?

[jalefkowit]

Can you tell us which news outlets have agreed to give a company's PR person final approval authority for their reporting? I'd like to know so I can make sure to avoid them at all costs. Thanks.

Re:irony

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.

Re:Presentation Laundering, and related ethics

[Idarubicin]

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.

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.

Re:Well, maybe "sad" wasn't my first choice of wor

[firewrought]

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.

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.