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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.'"

4 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. It's not plagiarism... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's a "mashup"...

    1. Re:It's not plagiarism... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Plagiarism is copying from one source. Research is copying from many.

      Another snappy witticism on slashdot. But it's wrong. And not in a nitpicky killjoy technicality kind of a way, but just plain wrong. So inaccurate, that it's not funny is what I'm saying. Plagiarism is when you directly copy, or reinterpret with significant similiarity, the work of another without citing the original author. It's got squat to do with how many places you take from. And it's perfectly fine to build on the ideas of others - hell that's the foundation of academia - as long as you don't pass off that work as your own.

  2. 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.

  3. Re:Inability to cite web??? by eln · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Using Wikipedia entries even if they're properly cited is unacceptable. If he wanted to use Wikipedia as a research tool, that's fine, but he should have read through the materials cited by the Wikipedia article itself and used them as his sources, with proper citation. If the Wikipedia article cited no sources, then it shouldn't have been used at all.