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???

[Americano]

It is ludicrous either way. The author provided no reason why the existing citation formats for web sources weren't "good," he simply asserted he "couldn't find a good format." This suggests to me the author is:

1. Full of shit
2. Lazy
3. All of the above.

I find it hard to believe that the good folks at Hyperion Books - who sort of make a business of publishing books - couldn't provide him with a few samples of citation formats and wouldn't tell him, "just pick one - if you don't like it, it doesn't matter, you have to include SOME citation as due diligence."

When there are accepted & well-defined methods for citing web pages & other electronic resource - as have been pointed out all over this thread - it is ludicrous to say there is "no good way" to cite web pages, period, full stop.