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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.'"
It's a "mashup"...
What is really interesting is that even though this article is 140 years old, they still ended the soft articles on a light note (maybe I notice this because the Onion mocks it so often?). The last few sentences:
I related to Mr. Lacoume the conversation which I had overheard between the old Frenchman and the waiter, and asked him if he had many discontented customers. "Oh yes," he replied laughing, "there are at least a dozen old fellows who come here every day, take one fifteen cent drink, eat a dinner which would cost them $1 in a restaurant, and then complain that the beef is tough or the potatoes water." Mr. Lacoume confirmed the statement that thousands of people in New-Orleans live on free lunches.
My work here is dung.
"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"
Really...because almost every form of writing style has web formats as a cite style these days.
Hell, I use APA style, but it isn't much harder in MLA (the two biggest styles)...and it isn't hard to find even more...
I wouldn't call this plagiarism, just lazy...and honestly, I know I've been lazy myself at times and screwed up (as I double check my thesis before handing it in tonight to make certain this hasn't happened to me!!!)
Nice cover with the 'alleged' in the title and all... but accidental non-citation is still plagiarism, I do believe. Therefore, since he's admitted himself, it's pretty much not 'alleged' any more. I don't care to share an opinion on the act, but I think we can safely call a spade a spare.
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.
The term is largely meaningless if you accept all works are derivative. Seems its only use is as writer's equivalent of gorilla feces-pitching.
No, the meaning is utterly clear. Don't pass off the work of other people as your own. Anything you add to the foundation is your contribution, and others wishing to build still further should cite you for that. Plagiarism is, in fact, when you *don't* accept that all works are derivative, and take credit for the whole body of work, not just the ideas that you added.
It's not a copyright issue.
An open-source equivalent would be if I created a cute little font switching extension for Firefox, and then claimed to have singlehandedly coded the browser, standardised HTML, and come up with CSS whilst I was at it.
I can understand problems with trying to cite a web source. Things like Wikipedia, you'd have to refer to a page in the history; the content is always being changed. ... and vandalized.
My objection to the author would be more along the lines of "why didn't you look up the sources used by wikipedia? Where IS the research?" As Wikipedia has a policy against original research, anything reliable on it is by definition at least second-hand. Is there a reason besides laziness that the author would not have indicated at least the sources given by wikipedia, if he could not do the research himself?
As opposed to...?