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Alleged Plagiarism In Chris Anderson's New Book

Posted by Soulskill on from the hyperlinks-don't-stick-to-dead-trees dept.

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.'"

2 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Web citing made easy by GMFTatsujin · · Score: 5, Informative

    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... "

    Zotero, brother: a plugin for Firefox. Makes citing online sources a breeze in any format you care to mention.

  2. Re:It's not plagiarism... by winwar · · Score: 3, Informative

    As there is no "-1 Wrong" moderation, I'll respond instead:

    "It's still plagiarism even if it's allowed by the original author."

    You are wrong. It is called authorized copying. There may also be some legal issues if the author wasn't allowed to get permission.

    "Students get in trouble if they get someone to take their exams for them."

    This is called cheating. Not plagiarism.

    "As long as there's misrepresentation going on, even if the original person gave permission for the misrepresentation, it's still a form of deception."

    Deception is not plagiarism. It may be considered unethical but that does not make it plagiarism.

    "If the misrepresentation was unintentional then that's different..."

    It doesn't matter. Now the penalties, if any, may be lower.