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

That doesn't seem like alot

[NinjaFarmer]

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.

Re:That doesn't seem like alot

[sprins]

Apparently Wikipedia has over 1.5 million english articles alone. So your calculation of the percentage of 'problematic' articles is even more favourable. Of those 142 eledgedly 'problematic' articles only a few really seem to be a problem as the others originated from the public domain to begin with.

Sounds like much ado about nothing once more. *yawn*

Re:That doesn't seem like alot

[aquaepulse]

Well that 142 was found out of his search of 12000, if his methodology was sound you could expect the proportion plagiarized within the 1.5 million to be about 17750. About 1.18%.

Re:That doesn't seem like alot

[tomhudson]

Considering that an audit of dead-tree encyclopedias hasn't been done, we can't say. What we CAN say is that its foolish to make a comparison with Britannica, when an audit of Britannica found 10% of 600 articles to be non-factual. The sources cited in those 10% disavowed the articles' contents.

This isn't all that surprising either, when you think about it. People cite people who cite people, and someone somewhere will mis-interpret what someone else wrote, or come to different conclusions while still citing the original author.

Daniel Brandt, valuable Wikipedia contributor

[alienmole]

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

US Gov copyright?

[julesh]

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...?

Re:US Gov copyright?

[DragonWriter]

Err... I thought works of the US Government were generally free from copyright...?

(1) The Wyoming state government is not the US government: state government works are not generally free from copyright.

(2) Plagiarism is separate from copyright violation, anyway. Using material that is not subject to copyright or is in the public domain that is from one unique identifiable source without crediting the source is plagiarism, as is using copyright material in a way that does not violate copyright without attribution (say, fair use.) Plagiarism isn't a violation of the law, but a violation of commonly accepted standards of integrity when it comes to not claiming other's work as your own.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What Brandt _should_ do, rather than crowing

[Howzer]

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.