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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
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.
"It's a wiki. If you find a problem with it, you fix it."
no, it's a wiki. If you find a problem with it, you add a template telling everyone that someone else should fix it.