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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.'"
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%.
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
(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.