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.'"

Comments

1% plagarism!

[goombah99]

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.