Alleged Plagiarism In Chris Anderson's New Book

ScorpFromHell writes "Blogger Waldo Jaquith alleges in his blog that Chris Anderson, Wired magazine's editor-in-chief and writer of The Long Tail, has apparently plagiarized content from various sources without attribution for his soon-to-be-published book. 'In the course of reading Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources. ... Most of the passages, but not all, come from Wikipedia.' When questioned about the similar passages, Anderson responded, "All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources... As you'll note, these are mostly on the margins of the book's focus, mostly on historical asides, but that's no excuse. I should have had a better process to make sure the write-through covered all the text that was not directly sourced. I think what we'll do is publish those notes after all, online as they should have been to begin with.'"

Comments

Re:Inability to cite web???

[JimFive]

Really? I don't see anything in there that solves the problem. Ok, there's an [Accessed On] tag, but that still doesn't stop the page from being irrecoverably modified on Date+1. So, if I wanted to fake references I would just need to look at the date the page was updated and pick some date prior to that to claim to have looked at it.

I didn't say there was no possible way to format a web citation, I said there was no good way to cite the web.

Citing arbitrary web pages is just asking for problems. Web versions of print publications are probably the safest to cite, followed by something like arxiv.org that has an interest in being citable then something with a change history like wikipedia, and finally, the rest of the web.
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JimFive