Slashdot Mirror
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."
The new WikiStar-Bulletin has been edited to reflect this fact.
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.
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.
How did they know that his articles weren't being plagurized by Wikipedia?
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.
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.
This article is [[plagiarism]]. You can [[help]] Wikipedia by [[reporting it]].
"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."
That the story of a journalist plagiarizing wikipedia, that was revealed on wikipedia, was plagiarized by the Star-Bulletin, the paper that employed the plagiarizing writer?
Irony meter broken!!! Alert Alert!!!
Plagiarism is a form of academic malpractice. It refers to the use of another's information, language, or writing, when done without proper acknowledgment of the original source. Plagiarism is not necessarily the same as copyright infringement, which occurs when one violates copyright law. Like most terms from the area of intellectual property, plagiarism is a concept of the modern age and not really applicable to medieval or ancient works.
This post would be plagairism had I not included this link, for instance. Perhaps because the journalist wrote for a printed newspaper, and couldn't get hyperlinks to work on paper, he thought it was better to include no hyperlink at all. He thought wrong.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
You mean select with mouse
then press ctrl + c
then press ctrl + v
But, but, isnt that feature of Windows ?
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
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.
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.
I think there's a lot. For example, 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.
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.
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."
From one of the stories linked in TFA (pops):
CORRECTION Saturday, December 24, 2005
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.
Please see the applicable Corrections Page for more information.
tinfoilmedia
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
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
..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.
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.
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?
So today slashdot loves wikipedia? I'll be looking forward to the "Wikipedia Kills Baby Seals" article tomorrow.
aoeu
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
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.
From the article: "[...] a 21 year veteran [...]". Do you see the word "old" in there anywhere? No. His career was twenty one years old, but presumably he himself was significantly older.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
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!"
Well, speaking as an administrator, a long-time contributor, and a historian, Wikipedia doesn't plagiarize all that often, because anything identified as a copyright violation gets deleted. If you were familiar with Wikipedia at all you would know that our rules on images are strict enough to cause plenty of grumbling and bitterness. Thanks for spouting off without knowing the facts though.
No statement is true, not even this one.
As was mentioned earlier in this thread, plagiarism does not directly relate to copyright. Any time you use someone else's words or thinking with the intent to imply that *you* were the author of those words or thoughts, you are a plagiarist. This differs from copyright, which has very specific legal meaning.
To be more specific: copyright can be proven or disproven in court. Plagiarism might not be provable in court. But if you are a professional writer (scientist, newspaper columnist, etc), and are caught obviously using someone else's material, even if not in a legal sense, your career is likely to be in jeopardy.
How do we know he's not the one who wrote the Wikipedia articles in question?
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
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.
What if Tim wrote the Wikipedia article?
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?
I know this is wildly off-topic, but the parent reminded me of a story my professor told me...
A student had handed in a paper for an exam and passed with a decent grade. Next year another student handed in the same paper, which he'd "borrowed" from the first student -- this time it was graded a bit higher than the first time though. Third year, yet another student handed in the exact same paper and it was returned to him with an even higher mark than the previous two and with a remark from the professor: "Now I've read this paper 3 times and it just keeps getting better every time I read it."
"Live free or don't."