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Wikipedia and Plagiarism
Spo22a writes "Daniel Brandt found the examples of suspected plagiarism at Wikipedia using a program he created to run a few sentences from about 12,000 articles against Google Inc.'s search engine. He removed matches in which another site appeared to be copying from Wikipedia, rather than the other way around, and examples in which material is in the public domain and was properly attributed.
Brandt ended with a list of 142 articles, which he brought to Wikipedia's attention.... 'They present it as an encyclopedia," Brandt said Friday. "They go around claiming it's almost as good as Britannica. They are trying to be mainstream respectable.'"
wikipedia is free.
Doesn't Wikipedia have over a million articles (not in English alone, I know)? That would mean that's less than .1% of the articles are plagiarized. Seems reasonable to me that that amount would get by into unnoticed. All it takes is for the original author then to deal with it.
Really, how is this news? I don't get it.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Wow. Only 142 articles in which average Joe Wiki forgot the proper way to attribute a source. I'm actually amazed there were so few occurrences. This article has the effect of heightening my opinion of Wikipedia's quality.
What's missing from the summary is that almost immediately upon getting the list, the articles in question were dealt with and the offenders were blocked or warned.
Wikipedia is written by a large community, and people make mistakes. I have read about other reference tomes that have been caught plagiarizing (for example, some encyclopedias or atlas's will put in a fake piece of data or a fake street so that they can easily determine if they're being copied from), and the turnaround time for fixing it can be years depending on the publishing cycle.
This isn't a condemndation of Wikipedia, despite Mr. Brandt's best efforts, it's a confirmation of why WP works.
142 articles is bugger-all, not all of these cases were actually plagiarism, and the biggest cited example in TFA is "An entire paragraph in Alonzo Clark's entry". Surely there has been much greater, and more significant plagiarism in Wikipedia than this? Why is this number so low?!
142 out of 12,000, some of which aren't really a problem, and that's numbers generated by a critic?
Yes, it's a problem, but that's actually not a bad score at all. You probably get more plagiarism than that on college papers at good schools. How many of these articles cite what they "plagiarize," even if they don't put it in quotes? Also, to make it legal plagiarizing, all you have to do is re-write each paragraph in your own words.
I see 1.18% of articles as potentially having text lifted from somewhere else as a serious issue for the maintainers of Wikipedia, sure. But I don't think it has a major negative impact on its reliability, or on the quantity or quality of information contained within it. And reliable information is what I care about when I go to wikipedia. If it worked only by having mass exerpts of other sites, I'd call it "GOOGLE," and I'd still use it.
Any Journal article comprised of 1% plagiarism would be subject to law suits, apologies and the journal would face ostracism. This is intellectual theft somehow made possible by the anonymity of the Wiki. We do tolerate this in less professional venues. For example, amateur reader comments are not subject to this kind of scrutiny. Comment sites like slashdot are protected from that sort of thing. But a formal identifiable entity that generates citable articles in itself, which has pervasive plagiarism at the 1% level needs to be shut down or it's citations fixed. This is a terrible day for the otherwise marvelous wikipedia concept. Deep thought is needed to figure out how to create some process of assured attribution. It's a shame. Even with the plagiarism Wikipedia is still informative. It's just that we can't become permissive about plagiarism even if it is for a good cause.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
As an occasional minor contributor and frequent user of Wikipedia, I have to say well done and thanks to Mr Brandt. It's a shame (but entirely predictable) that some lamebrains might feel the need to gain (imaginary, virtualised) kudos for work that isn't their own. Interesting, really - I get nothing for my little contributions apart from feeling a little smug (in a good way) every now and then. The status is completely disconnected from my meatspace existence (except in my head, I suppose, without wanting to come over all Dennett ;)
plagiarism on the internet?
Brandt, who has long sparred with Wikipedia over an unflattering biography of himself, called on Wikipedia to conduct a throughout review of all its articles.... Sounds like he's a politician. So what I'm a jackass, I molest underage boys, send troops to die... Wiki is plagiarizing"
Infiltrated dot Net
The proof of the pudding is in the eating; consider Mr Brandt comes up with a computer generated list of potential problematic articles. These are scrutinized and where needed problematic content is removed. The wiki methodology works thanks to Mr Brandt.
:)
Conclusion; the best way of improving Wikipedia is by showing where it has a problem. Mr Brandt disproved his opinion. Live and learn.
Thanks,
GerardM
Plagiarism by Wikipedia editors
Brandt is doing a great service to Wikipedia — checking for and reporting plagiarism. That takes dedication and hard work. It's ironic that he feels the need to present it as criticims of Wikipedia's model, when in fact he's demonstrating the power of contributions from many people with different motivations. Even if the motivation is anti-Wikipedia, Wikipedia just absorbs the input and grows stronger.
"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine..." -- Obi Wiki-nobi
I used to be a wikipedia administrator, before resigning due to time constraints. However, we would catch a lot of the copyright issues. I mean, when you're reading an article, and part of its plagerized, it's usually really obvious. The plagarized part usually doesn't fit into the rest of the article.. and you can just tell that the average editor didn't write that copy. (Just as I'm sure a teacher can tell one of his/her students didn't write a plagerized essay) Once you found the possibly infringing content, you could google parts of the suspect text, and see if it appears anywhere else. If it does, you'd either report the problem or remove it yourself.
I used to run into these all the time... but the thing is... a lot of them are caught and removed. Wikipedia has a system to deal with such infrigements, and the users that post them. (See Wikipedia's policy and their copyright problems reporting page) The truth is that you're going to find copyright problems wherever there is user-submitted content (look at YouTub!, for example).
Not Flamebait. how about an intelligent balanced comment worth discussing.
142 articles out of 12,000 is certainly a problem, but actually not much of one. I'm sure it he made his script public (I have no idea if he did so. In the /. tradition, I did not RTFArticle) and the wikipedia were to use it, it would be of benefit. Not to automatically tag articles as plagiarism, but at least tag them for further evaluation by an editor.
Buy, hey, 142/12000 is less than 2%. I would have thought the percentage would have been at least 5%.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I ask because apparently You did not actually graduate high school yet if you can't understand what the difference is between cited and uncited text.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
...especially to any math articles. 142 is 1.183...% of 12000. Not "less than 0.1%"
Articles with offending passages have been stripped of most text. An entire paragraph in Alonzo Clark's entry, for instance, was deleted, leaving the article with the bare-bones: "Alonzo M. Clark (August 13, 1868-October 12, 1952) was an American politician who was Governor of Wyoming from 1931 to 1933."
The original article, Brandt said, was copied from a biography on the Wyoming state government site.
Err... I thought works of the US Government were generally free from copyright...?
It's very lazy of of the Wikipedia authors to enter the same biographical information as other sites.
They should write new and interesting histories for all these people rather than using the same old worn out ideas that are on so many places on the net.
All it takes is a little imagination.
A new birth place, better achivements (why could hitler not have discovered the cure for cancer and be the first man on the moon? It's better than the depressing story on Wiki at the moment.) and some creative editing would solve this problem once and for all.
Some Wiki articles are already better and contain things about people that have never happened, but sadly these often get put back to the same old boring stories almost as soon as the changes are made.
First, the sample size was 12,000. Where did that number come from? Were the samples picked randomly? Assuming so, is 12,000 a statistically an effective sample size? And if the samples are random, and the size is sufficient, is that 142 articles statistically significant, that is, are the number of matches outside the margin of error? In other words, does the sample size, selection, and methodology, merit a margin of error around 1%.
And then we get to the fact that sometimes wikipedia text is copied to other sites. This in itself leads to the conclusion that wikipedia has some credibility, even if unfounded. I found it interesting that we are not told how many articles off wikipedia were plagiarized. I also wonder what 'Wikipedia appeared to be the one plagiarized' means, and what systematic errors was introduced by that subjective judgement. Perhaps 1%?
There is no question that plagiarism is a big issue, and we all must watch for it. I am on the side that plagiarism in no more an issue than in the past, but with better communication and distribution, we catch it more. At some level, because it so easy to plagiarize now, we perhaps see more egregious cases of it.
What gets me is that an analysis of such low analytical value is news. I am once again amazed at how little people seem to know or care about proper logic. In the end all we know is that some study with questionable methodology produced 142 hits. Not a huge revalation, even if we stipulate the study is of even minimal value.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
if you place 100 people in a room and tell them all to write several paragraphs about a specific subject, I wonder how many of them would have the very same sentence within their paragraphs. Theres only so many ways to say something
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"They are trying to be mainstream respectable."
And plagiarism is going to change the mainstream's respect level for Wikipedia?
I'm confused by the concept of plagiarism on wikipedia. For example, the article describes a biography copied from a government website. Isn't the point of Wikipedia to catalog and assemble information? How is copying an openly published biography from a government website considered plagiarism? Wikipedia is not being sold. No one is taking credit for the articles. Most cases, the original info is cited anyway. Anyway, please let me know what I'm missing here (which is probably a lot).
Authors of malware are trying to exploit the good reputation of Wikipedia to infect PCs with their malicious software. In a mass e-mail, recipients were told to download a "security update" for windows from a Wikipedia site.
The attackers had used a Wikipedia feature that archives all previous versions of articles when changes have been made. The malicious page thus continued to exist in the archive, and the attackers were able to point to it in mass emails.
See here , here and here.
This is how you fix the problems with Wikipedia: Point them out in a way that makes the problems easy to fix. Okay, it's probably still harder to get criticism against user conduct and policies reacted upon, but the way Wikipedia works, the content is still easy to fix. Especially in the case of plagiarism.
I really wish people would conduct accuracy and plagiarism studies a bit more often - especially when it's easy to fix, like this.
And by the way, Wikipedia recently got a bot that finds suspected plagiarism, which is pretty cool.
They were just authored by Roland Piquepaille. His articles are always all his own work, so it must be a mistake in the program.
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
I know tubgirl... but what is YouTub?
Someone needs to brush up on stats.. Get back to us when the results are statistically analyzed to measure the results to determine are the results actually anything to worry about..
Fred Grott(aka shareme) http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
While plagiarism is bad, Wikipedia is free, and it's good that this information is mirrored at more than one web site. Anyway, if they start to present false information/blatant lies as fact, then that is when the bitch sessions need to really start.
Is there a description how this bot identifies plagiarism? Does he search for random edits?
It seems to be th3 c00l3ss to bash Wiki lately, but the bottom line is there is no encyclopedic reference that comes close. The media and other pseudo-pundits who seem to resent any influential source of information that doesn't have obvious corporate influence (read: money-based control) as a major threat and they do whatever they can to discredit Wikipedia. Aside from a tiny subset of controversial articles that routinely get vandalized, and another tiny subset of plagiarism, this issue is likely to be blown way out of proportion by those who have a vested interest in destroying any information resource they cannot control.
I tend to check the citations on Wikipedia. If there is no citation and I can't find a somewhat reliable source on Google related to the information I'm looking at -- I know I can't trust that information.
These people who ramble on that Wikipedia is inaccurate almost appear to me like they never sat history class in high-school. Where you have to verify your sources.
I've also never heard of citing encyclopedias in research projects, ever. Good-grade coursework, also never seen them cite encyclopedia entries (they may cite information that was cited to on some encyclopedias).
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
...that people are worried about wiki plagiarizing *other* sites. I'd love to see how many students plagiarize off of the wiki. Let alone double check all the supposed facts they get off of wikipedia. Personally I would *never* use wikipedia to help write a paper. Granted it is checked by people, but the fact that anyone and everyone can post to it leaves me with concerns. There have already been examples of abuse from Politicians and other parties with their own agendas that abuse the system.
With that said I had an English Lit teacher in my college class print out stuff from wiki and use it has handouts. I was surprised any teacher would use wiki as a source for educational information. Sure its a great idea, but there is just too much information that can't be processed for authenticity at every turn.
"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty."
Why is this news? Maybe because the Associated Press says it's news, and it's in hundreds of newspapers?
S ignpost/2006-10-30/Plagiarism_cleanup
Why should Slashdotters care? Because while AP doesn't use links, Slashdot should have the courtesy of linking to the original sources that AP used to generate the report. (Plus AP also checked with Jimmy Wales for a reply, which is expected from professional reporters.)
The report is at http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/psamples.html
Wikipedia's own newsletter reports on it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_
The efforts of Wikipedia administrators to clean up the mess are chronicled here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:W.marsh/list
Of course, Slashdotters may continue shooting from the hip if they choose. It's what they do best.
Brandt has a long-standing (well, year-old) beef with Wikipedia. You can read about it, ironically enough, in the Wikipedia article about him.
He got into a dispute because he didn't like having his biography on WP (though it was constructed from publicly available news sources). He was generally combative and belligerent, and so was blocked and banned various times; check out the Talk archives for details. Afterwards he started a webpage where he attempted to list the real-world identities of the editors involved in the dispute.
Brandt is also the guy responsible for outing the anonymous editor in the Seigenthaler controversy.
Its just slightly over 1%.
Any statisticians able to say whether thats a valid sample?
How was the list of 12000 constructed? Completely random? Most popular articles? Most likely to contain plagirism in this nutters opinion?
Daniel Brandt is against Wikipedia's portrayal of him not because of it being unflattering (it is, in my opinion, if anything oddly sympathetic to his position, despite his position being that it shouldn't exist at all), but because of his privacy concerns. He's a privacy activist with a particular focus on the actions of information organizing sites, and so he's not unexpectedly against the existance of unauthorized widely-available detailed biographies. He's gone so far as to complain about CIA and NSA websites using cookies, so it's not surprising that he wouldn't be happy about a vast conspiracy to produce reports on unwilling individuals, regardless of the merits of the reports.
Anti-Linux trolls are so 1990's.
This isn't surprising, seeing how _anybody_ can edit wikipedia. The inability to verify has always been an issue with wikipedia. Furthermore, I'm sure that most of these 'incidents' could be rectified by simply changing a few words and then referencing the source webpage. Then, instead of it being plagerism, it would be accountable reference work.
Bah.
http://what-is-what.com/what_is/digg.html
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Is it such a good idea, checking for and reporting plagiarism? While that takes dedication and hard work, it's notable that he feels the need to present it as criticims of Wikipedia's model, because in fact he's demonstrating the power of plagarism from many people with different motivations. Even if the motivation is anti-Wikipedia, Wikipedia just absorbs the input and grows stronger. That doesn't seem a good thing.
Brandt's original paper is here, explaining his methodology and giving the complete list of articles he found. Wikipedia's response is here, where people go through the list one by one and also check the other contributions of users who have added copyrighted content. Wikipedia also has a bot which aims to detect newly added copyright violations by searching Google.
Daniel Brandt can't edit Wikipedia so it's not true that anyone can edit it.
It's great this guy created a program to make it easier for them to avoid this problem.
That's the great thing about open source and projects like wiki.
You encounter a problem, it's very easy for people to fix it quickly.
If those 142 items are real, they are probably already being fixed now if not all fixed.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Does the article make any claims as to how Mr. Brandt chose the sample of 12,000 articles? How can we look for biases in the sample?
HUH? I did not see anything that was true in that little statement.
hello
"They present it as an encyclopedia," Brandt said Friday.
Well, yes. Not that odd, really, given that it is an encyclopedia.
"They go around claiming it's almost as good as Britannica."
Actually, Wikipedians don't, in my experience. Most are quite sober when it comes to comparisons with Britannica. Brandt may be referring to the journal Nature, which did make such a claim for science articles.
They are trying to be mainstream respectable.
Wikipedia is already pretty darn mainstream, and if by "respectable" Brandt means "free of plagiarised material", then he's correct.
I hope they didn't count the sites that mirror Wikipedia's content as their own (answers.com I think it is that is notorious).
"They present it as an encyclopedia," Brandt said Friday. "They go around claiming it's almost as good as Britannica. They are trying to be mainstream respectable."
Whether something is plagerized or not, doesn't really impact the quality of it. If someone copied a great article into Wikipedia, then Wikipedia has a great article - just through foul play. There's previously been comparisons which have shown Wikipedia to be just as accurate as Britannica. Now, it's been a while since I looked at a dictionary, but from what I can tell Wikipedia has far more external references than your average encyclopedia. I guess mostly because a wikipedia page has little credibility on its own. So both as a reference and as a starting point it's better, what remains is just whether it's "respectable". With 99% own content, you can hardly say they've been using this as a strategy. I don't know what you could compare it with, it's as if one linux app copied some code, and someone called Red Hat not respectable for distributing it despite being completely unaware. Or better yet, tried to imply that their business is built on stolen software. What's next? "I can find text copied without permission on google. They're eeeeeeeeeeevil"?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You're not only not buying the book of whoever did the (possibly expensive) research, you're not even crediting them so they get zero credit and because you've got the info you need you're even less likely to seek out the author's work! Just because the perpatrator(sp?) has little to gain commiting the crime doesn't make it victimless!
Source of story here:
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/psamples.html
Even there I don't think there's enough information to actually make a judgement on this. What algorithm did he use. Where are they plagerised from? How can you tell who copied who (there's a LOT of plagerism FROM wikipedia)? Where's the data? How did he select the articles?
In short... show me the evidence.
In the Encyclopaedia Britannica and other published, for-sale reference works, the articles' sources are not only attributed, but the author of the article is attributed and his/her credentials displayed as a guide to their qualifications in providing the article.
Now, an article presenting facts can be written by someone who has no academic qualifications but still represents the facts fairly and accurately, so I don't claim that a person MUST be academically qualified to write a good article, nor do I claim that an article is good just because a person with "academic" qualifications writes it. However, I believe that the articles' authors should be identified, and the article parts should be identified as primary, secondary or tertiary.
I go to the Wikipedia for information, but I'm cautious. I want to be able to cite the information in the Wikipedia, and that requires authors and accurate attribution.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Wikipedia is shit. Lots of plagiarism, and lots of very POV edits that claim to be NPOV edits of already NPOV material.
And when you get to the heart of it, TRUTH is a POV and worked around as censorship at Wikipedia.
Fuck wikipedia.
Plagarism shows up frequently in Wikipedia, but usually it's promotional. Typically, company X copied their "about" page into Wikipedia. Bands and musicians, usually ones that are a legend only in their own minds, try this. A new user associated with the thing being promoted is usually responsible.
Then there are the people with a collector mindset. They create endless minor articles like "Indiana State Highway 22" and biographical articles of long-forgotten city council members. Often by cutting and pasting. This is annoying, but complaints of copyright infringement are unlikely.
Alright, we've seen this before. Someone writes a prgoram to prove something, then runs it, dances around with the results and says, "Hey look over here, I proved that Wikipedia is stealing info from other sites..." But he leaves off his results, how the code works or how he verified that his results were accurate. What if the site that he's crediting the source material with was really the one who stole it in the first place? How many generations and cross matches did he perform? Is it per word and ordered matching, or does it consider the phrases: "We went to work today" and "Went to work today" to be same?
If you'ver going to run an article like this and expect people to take it seriously, we need details. LOTS OF DETAILS.
Does my comment mean I don't think some of the content is uncredited, or stolen? No, it probably is, but anytime anyone presents what amounts to an experiement, it should be held to a scientific standard and subject to peer review, otherwise you end up with a bunch of people thinking something that is fact, is not, and something that is not fact is. People need to be reminded to think critically when we see articles like this, or any article that makes a claim based on "my research" or "my program". Just because you made an experiement that proves your hypothesis, doesn't mean it proves anything. I want more details, I want to review his findings, I want to review his process, and I want to see how deep he dug before he claimed that something in the public domain was actually not credited to its source.
If I wrote an article on some subject and then decided to share that information with Wikipedia, I may well just copy my text verbatim. Does that make it plagiarism? If I wrote the text, why can't I reuse it? How does this guy know that's not what's going on here?
Can it still move forward? More at 11.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Abuse of the word, "mainstream." Republicans cheapen this and many other words by arbitrarily adding them to whatever (moronic) sentences, the same way as they piss on the Constitution.
"They are trying to be mainstream respectable."
Brandt, you stupid fuckhead.
What is a spambot doing trolling slashdot? Wouldn't your time be better spent sending bulk emails for your diabolical masters?
What kind of moron cites an encyclopedia entry? After the fifth grade or so, nobody considers any encyclopedia (free or not) to be a source for any kind of article or paper. It is a starting point to get an overview of a topic or a quick reference. Encyclopedias are never intended to be a proper source for any intelectual endevor. Didn't you go to school?
You might like to know that Daniel Brandt founded Google Watch back in the old days to protest against page rank. Yes, Google Watch was originally just against how Google didn't give mr Brandt a good page rank. Now he added some bits about privacy but I think anyone should visit Google Watch now to see how childish Daniel Brandt is. And using Google to do datamining is against the acceptable use policy anyway.
If you're writing a summary article (e.g., on the current state of data mining), then as little as 10% (or even less) could be your own conclusions. However, if you're writing about your own research, then you definitely want most of it to be your own conclusions. (The first paragraph of what you wrote, however, is spot on.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
It's not out of 1 million, its out of the 12,000 he examined. That comes to
1.2%,which is still pretty good,
From the Wiki article:
"From the 1960s onwards, Brandt collected clippings and citations pertaining to influential people and intelligence matters. In the 1980s, through his company Micro Associates, he sold a database of citations of these clippings, books, government reports, and other publications."
Pot, kettle, hello.....??!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Plagiarism from offline sources was not detectable by this method.
Not exactly. The job of Wikipedia (or for that matter any other general encyclopedia) is to provide verifiable information from reliable sources. Verifiability > truth until the truth becomes verifiable.
Wikipedia is a free and open source of information for all people. I'm all for it if they get decent data off of somewhere else. I'd like it if it was more properly bibliographized or whatever, but that seems like small potatoes over the background of what it is that wikipedia is attempting to be for the world.
What stupid text book industry shill came up with this crack pot survey? And as somebody else pointed out ~1% of plagiarism isn't exactly high in my opinion.
Stop being an asshole, and if you DO find plagiarism, label it as such, and give us a better footnote as to where the original information came from.
Jesus!
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Some things have been explained in so many diffrent ways that it gets harder and harder to try and find a new one, so why bother, not that I support plagiarism, but I don't support crybabies either.
Do you realize that that is self-contradictory a few times? Such as when it builds up trying to say Linux is painfully difficult to use and then near the end it states that you only need a little more knowledge to use it? It can't be both! This is why anti-Linux people on /. are generally seen as trolls: they usually are.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
Google Watch Watch
Clever signature text goes here.
The other was submitted to (and accepted by) a journal. Submitting to a journal, of course, is more like submitting for a grade than doing a project for a client.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
only 140 something out of 12,000 articles were plagarized?
Wow.
I seem to remember from high school that the major dictionaries sometimes put made up words in their dictionaries in order to catch plagaristic competing dictionary makers. Similarly they'll add an extra fake definition to a word, and then watch over the next decade or two to see if another dictionary picks up the fake definition.
Encyclopedias do the same. Add some small tidbit of fake information to an article to see if it surfaces somewhere else.
I don't believe the dictionary and encyclopedia publishers do this by accident...they do it because they have experienced such things before and found this to be a very easy way to prove stupidity and plagarism on the other person's part.
Honestly...I think less then 200 our of over 12,000 articles is actually proving that it is quite good...and indeed non-plagarised. Especially considering that wiki articles tend to be significantly longer, more in depth, and with more recent and politically charged items in it...I think it proves quite a large degree of integrity on wikipedia's part.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
Am I the only one who finds it vaguely humorous that the same Daniel Brandt who wants to bust Google's balls has to use Google in his campaign to bust Wikipedia's balls?
If it wasn't for half of the people in this country, the other half would be all of them -- Col. Stoopnagle
You'd assume so, but copyright law only explicitly excludes works by the U.S. federal Government. States and other local governments can and often do claim copyright on their work. http://cendi.dtic.mil/publications/04-8copyright.h tml#30
"When you steal from one author, it's plagarism. When you steal from many, it's research."
- Wilson Mizner
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
If you would have read the post, you would have noticed that I don't believe credentials are sufficient for evaluating information. And if you had read the response to the AC, you would have seen the clarification on cites. I think you have jumped to a conclusion not warranted by the text. In fact, looking over your post, I see you have managed to exhibit 19 of the 83 common rhetorical fallacies (a couple more than once), and still miss the point: The founders of the Wikipedia hold the Wikipedia to be a reputable source of knowledge and information, yet some authors do not reveal their own expertise or biases. In fact, we have numerous instances where the authors have battled to change the content of articles to promote their own point of view without disclaimer, or to hide information inimical to their particular point of view. This problem, (I define a problem as a discrepancy between the way things are and the way I want them to be), is, IMO, something that could be resolved by a higher editorial policy. The Wikipedia is only a place to begin discussion, but it is not a reliable place to start discussion at this time. Although the majority of the articles have additional links, many times the links are selected for their bias rather than their objectivity.
Your point about trustability is well-taken. If I read something in the Wikipedia I want to know if it is a fact or an opinion. If it is a fact, I want to determine the probablility, "Is it true?" If it is an opinion, I want to know what the arguments are for and against the opinion. An argument should stand on its merits, but if I know a particular author of an article about Capitalism is a high-ranking member of the Socialist Workers Party, I am warned to examine the arguments a little closer. One strength of the Wikipedia is that a very biased article will probably get ammended or challenged pretty quickly. However, "article by consensus" is not really an unbiased source of information either.
As for the post-internet generation: I have seen no evidence that the internet has improved thinking and independent thought. Although somewhat of a ranter, John Taylor Gatto ( http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ ) has pointed out the deficiencies of our educational system. My interpretation of his writing is to conclude that the education system, particularly public schooling, suppresses independent, creative and objective thought. What I see personally on the internet, is a proliferation of what Sociologists term "crowd behavior", in which the intelligence exhibited by the crowd performs significantly below the average intelligence of the individual members. YMMV.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
I hope this isn't modded as flame bait, becuase I'm really being honest here in my argument. So, I'll get down to it.
First, American education enforces plagiarism. That's right! How so? Well, take for instance the fact that almost every test in any mundane American education facility almost always encourages the student to regurgitate a canned answer from a designated source of information. It gets even worse when you enter the University level, and is unbelievably worse yet, if you enter any top tier Univeristy (where the professors themselves demand you buy *their* book).
Even if such a class exists, as "Critical Thinking", there's really nothing truely critical about it. Factor into the above facts with another fact that American and European societies are bent on "Political Correctness". This only serves to deter true critical thinking, becuase any deterance or compelling factor to NOT speak you mind, regardless of how vulgar it is, is taking away from the full spectrum of perceptive analysis. Even acadamia is infected with this little bit, that's why you never see any books dedicated to the good things about Hitler, the bad things about Ghandi, even though any person in their right mind shall admit, even if in private, that Yin and Yang did not ellude either of the two. There's a formula for the above. If X is a positive admission, Y is a negative admission and Z is the general image you are trying to paint the person in (where Z is a magnitude of either X or Y), any X/Y granted that is not a magnitude of Z, then the opposite SHALL be grotesquely over exaggerated as to make the other negligable. That's why, not one single historian or author is willing to point out the obvious and say (for example) Hitler was a genius and leave it at that. They have to stress to childish levels of zeal that he was insane or cruel or anything to belittle the positive claim. The same exact thing is also for other icons that aren't under a negative light... Dr. Martin Luther King, Ghandi etc. It's VERY difficult, and in Europe outright illegal, to have any real partial analysis of these icons; infact, there's a man in Germany on trail becuase he does question a lot of the fabricated claims about Hitler. Winston Churchill wasn't no angel, yet how many texts are there that focus on only the bad without trying to backpeddle and counter the negative claims to preserve his image? None.
Work environments... when you're asked to document, you always have to pull stuff verbatim from sources your boss might respect. In English 101, we have to write papers with references for each and every claim. While this is an entirely different debate, on the laziness of ignorant people above you to prefer you have references rather than understand your statments to agree or disagree, this does present encouragement for the ease of the situation to simply copy and idea once you establish that someone important said it. How many ways are you going to "put in your own words" an idea of someone so much smarter or wiser than yourself? It suffices to accept the adage as profound wisdom and preserve it in all it's glory. (That's a well made remark!)
Also, not to mention, a fact does not have a poetic license! Meaning that, there are only so many ways to be sweet and direct in explaining what the Pythagorean Theorem is. Anything more is just bluff and fluff. As for a self perceived description of Ghandi, that would vary greatly from one to the other becuase no claim would be reflective of Truth and Fact, however for any real facts... "Ghandi was born on October 2, 1869"... how many other ways are you going to say that? We can use synonyms, pick up a thesaurus... we can hire someone to practically translate it to Latin and toss it translation to the reader... or, perhaps we can just go all around the world for that simple statement and then copyright a paragraph and a half all for just stating the date he was born. "Ghandi was born on October 2, 1869", must be plagiarism! If you say it outloud, you're in c
Is release the script or code that he used to generate his 142 plagiarised articles out of 12,000.
Such a script, if tuned and more widely applied, could be extraordinarily useful in weeding out future instances of plagiarism.
142 articles flagged, 142 articles fixed within hours. That's Wikipedia working as no dead-tree encyclopedia can.
Of course, Brandt would never do anything as useful as that, but will probably content himself with continuing to "shoot from the hip" and claim this as a blow against the Wikipedia community, rather than a bravura demonstration of exactly how well it works.
Only 148 articles out of over 12,000? That doesn't sound very newsworthy. Plus, no mention was made of checking those 148 for contributions from the original authors of works found elsewhere on the Web.
It has been decided by whomever has made the most cognizant argument regarding the proper interpretation of evidence provided.
Clearly, you have never edited any of the wiki articles on evolution, the balkans or the palestinian/israeli conflict.
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Someone please explain to me, why it is bad (for Wikipedia, or public in general) to have a copy of information already put on state government site? Noone's claiming that the text is original anyway/