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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."
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.
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 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
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's not reuse that's bad, it's reuse without attribution. Even the loosey-goosey BSD license requires attribution!
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
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wiki pedia
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
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.
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
What if Tim wrote the Wikipedia article?