Wikipedia and Plagiarism

Spo22a writes "Daniel Brandt found the examples of suspected plagiarism at Wikipedia using a program he created to run a few sentences from about 12,000 articles against Google Inc.'s search engine. He removed matches in which another site appeared to be copying from Wikipedia, rather than the other way around, and examples in which material is in the public domain and was properly attributed. Brandt ended with a list of 142 articles, which he brought to Wikipedia's attention.... 'They present it as an encyclopedia," Brandt said Friday. "They go around claiming it's almost as good as Britannica. They are trying to be mainstream respectable.'"

But

wikipedia is free.

That doesn't seem like alot

Doesn't Wikipedia have over a million articles (not in English alone, I know)? That would mean that's less than .1% of the articles are plagiarized. Seems reasonable to me that that amount would get by into unnoticed. All it takes is for the original author then to deal with it.

Re:That doesn't seem like alot

Well that 142 was found out of his search of 12000, if his methodology was sound you could expect the proportion plagiarized within the 1.5 million to be about 17750. About 1.18%.

Re:That doesn't seem like alot

"It's a wiki. If you find a problem with it, you fix it."
no, it's a wiki. If you find a problem with it, you add a template telling everyone that someone else should fix it.

How is this news?

Really, how is this news? I don't get it.

Impressive

Wow. Only 142 articles in which average Joe Wiki forgot the proper way to attribute a source. I'm actually amazed there were so few occurrences. This article has the effect of heightening my opinion of Wikipedia's quality.

Not shocking, but not a big deal

What's missing from the summary is that almost immediately upon getting the list, the articles in question were dealt with and the offenders were blocked or warned.

Wikipedia is written by a large community, and people make mistakes. I have read about other reference tomes that have been caught plagiarizing (for example, some encyclopedias or atlas's will put in a fake piece of data or a fake street so that they can easily determine if they're being copied from), and the turnaround time for fixing it can be years depending on the publishing cycle.

This isn't a condemndation of Wikipedia, despite Mr. Brandt's best efforts, it's a confirmation of why WP works.

Only 142?!

142 articles is bugger-all, not all of these cases were actually plagiarism, and the biggest cited example in TFA is "An entire paragraph in Alonzo Clark's entry". Surely there has been much greater, and more significant plagiarism in Wikipedia than this? Why is this number so low?!

Pfizzle.

142 out of 12,000, some of which aren't really a problem, and that's numbers generated by a critic?

Yes, it's a problem, but that's actually not a bad score at all. You probably get more plagiarism than that on college papers at good schools. How many of these articles cite what they "plagiarize," even if they don't put it in quotes? Also, to make it legal plagiarizing, all you have to do is re-write each paragraph in your own words.

I see 1.18% of articles as potentially having text lifted from somewhere else as a serious issue for the maintainers of Wikipedia, sure. But I don't think it has a major negative impact on its reliability, or on the quantity or quality of information contained within it. And reliable information is what I care about when I go to wikipedia. If it worked only by having mass exerpts of other sites, I'd call it "GOOGLE," and I'd still use it.

1% plagarism!

Any Journal article comprised of 1% plagiarism would be subject to law suits, apologies and the journal would face ostracism. This is intellectual theft somehow made possible by the anonymity of the Wiki. We do tolerate this in less professional venues. For example, amateur reader comments are not subject to this kind of scrutiny. Comment sites like slashdot are protected from that sort of thing. But a formal identifiable entity that generates citable articles in itself, which has pervasive plagiarism at the 1% level needs to be shut down or it's citations fixed. This is a terrible day for the otherwise marvelous wikipedia concept. Deep thought is needed to figure out how to create some process of assured attribution. It's a shame. Even with the plagiarism Wikipedia is still informative. It's just that we can't become permissive about plagiarism even if it is for a good cause.

Brandt is a Republican

Brandt, who has long sparred with Wikipedia over an unflattering biography of himself, called on Wikipedia to conduct a throughout review of all its articles.... Sounds like he's a politician. So what I'm a jackass, I molest underage boys, send troops to die... Wiki is plagiarizing"

The proof of the pudding

The proof of the pudding is in the eating; consider Mr Brandt comes up with a computer generated list of potential problematic articles. These are scrutinized and where needed problematic content is removed. The wiki methodology works thanks to Mr Brandt.

Conclusion; the best way of improving Wikipedia is by showing where it has a problem. Mr Brandt disproved his opinion. Live and learn. :)

Thanks,
        GerardM

Daniel Brandt, valuable Wikipedia contributor

Brandt is doing a great service to Wikipedia — checking for and reporting plagiarism. That takes dedication and hard work. It's ironic that he feels the need to present it as criticims of Wikipedia's model, when in fact he's demonstrating the power of contributions from many people with different motivations. Even if the motivation is anti-Wikipedia, Wikipedia just absorbs the input and grows stronger.

"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine..." -- Obi Wiki-nobi

From an ex-wikipedia administrator

I used to be a wikipedia administrator, before resigning due to time constraints. However, we would catch a lot of the copyright issues. I mean, when you're reading an article, and part of its plagerized, it's usually really obvious. The plagarized part usually doesn't fit into the rest of the article.. and you can just tell that the average editor didn't write that copy. (Just as I'm sure a teacher can tell one of his/her students didn't write a plagerized essay) Once you found the possibly infringing content, you could google parts of the suspect text, and see if it appears anywhere else. If it does, you'd either report the problem or remove it yourself.

I used to run into these all the time... but the thing is... a lot of them are caught and removed. Wikipedia has a system to deal with such infrigements, and the users that post them. (See Wikipedia's policy [wikipedia.org] and their copyright problems reporting page [wikipedia.org]) The truth is that you're going to find copyright problems wherever there is user-submitted content (look at YouTub!, for example).

142 out of 12,000?

142 articles out of 12,000 is certainly a problem, but actually not much of one. I'm sure it he made his script public (I have no idea if he did so. In the /. tradition, I did not RTFArticle) and the wikipedia were to use it, it would be of benefit. Not to automatically tag articles as plagiarism, but at least tag them for further evaluation by an editor.

Buy, hey, 142/12000 is less than 2%. I would have thought the percentage would have been at least 5%.

US Gov copyright?

Articles with offending passages have been stripped of most text. An entire paragraph in Alonzo Clark's entry, for instance, was deleted, leaving the article with the bare-bones: "Alonzo M. Clark (August 13, 1868-October 12, 1952) was an American politician who was Governor of Wyoming from 1931 to 1933."

The original article, Brandt said, was copied from a biography on the Wyoming state government site.

Err... I thought works of the US Government were generally free from copyright...?

Re:US Gov copyright?

Err... I thought works of the US Government were generally free from copyright...?

(1) The Wyoming state government is not the US government: state government works are not generally free from copyright.

(2) Plagiarism is separate from copyright violation, anyway. Using material that is not subject to copyright or is in the public domain that is from one unique identifiable source without crediting the source is plagiarism, as is using copyright material in a way that does not violate copyright without attribution (say, fair use.) Plagiarism isn't a violation of the law, but a violation of commonly accepted standards of integrity when it comes to not claiming other's work as your own.

Biographical articles.

It's very lazy of of the Wikipedia authors to enter the same biographical information as other sites.
They should write new and interesting histories for all these people rather than using the same old worn out ideas that are on so many places on the net.
All it takes is a little imagination.
A new birth place, better achivements (why could hitler not have discovered the cure for cancer and be the first man on the moon? It's better than the depressing story on Wiki at the moment.) and some creative editing would solve this problem once and for all.

Some Wiki articles are already better and contain things about people that have never happened, but sadly these often get put back to the same old boring stories almost as soon as the changes are made.

ok methodology, bad analysis

In this kind of study, basing the conclusion on the presence of few hits would characterize the study as faith based science.

First, the sample size was 12,000. Where did that number come from? Were the samples picked randomly? Assuming so, is 12,000 a statistically an effective sample size? And if the samples are random, and the size is sufficient, is that 142 articles statistically significant, that is, are the number of matches outside the margin of error? In other words, does the sample size, selection, and methodology, merit a margin of error around 1%.

And then we get to the fact that sometimes wikipedia text is copied to other sites. This in itself leads to the conclusion that wikipedia has some credibility, even if unfounded. I found it interesting that we are not told how many articles off wikipedia were plagiarized. I also wonder what 'Wikipedia appeared to be the one plagiarized' means, and what systematic errors was introduced by that subjective judgement. Perhaps 1%?

There is no question that plagiarism is a big issue, and we all must watch for it. I am on the side that plagiarism in no more an issue than in the past, but with better communication and distribution, we catch it more. At some level, because it so easy to plagiarize now, we perhaps see more egregious cases of it.

What gets me is that an analysis of such low analytical value is news. I am once again amazed at how little people seem to know or care about proper logic. In the end all we know is that some study with questionable methodology produced 142 hits. Not a huge revalation, even if we stipulate the study is of even minimal value.

That is a very unreal scenario

Daniel Brandt wrote a script that pinpoints all the plagiarized pages. That is a very unlikely scenario in real life. He should have selected a sample of random pages, and check which are plagiarized.

• Claim surfing the web is risky because his firewalls only gives access to phishing sites
  
• Say sex is dangerous, because he frequents a nightclub were all members have STD
  
• Assert numbers don't have square roots because his population is made of negative numbers.
  

Confused?

I'm confused by the concept of plagiarism on wikipedia. For example, the article describes a biography copied from a government website. Isn't the point of Wikipedia to catalog and assemble information? How is copying an openly published biography from a government website considered plagiarism? Wikipedia is not being sold. No one is taking credit for the articles. Most cases, the original info is cited anyway. Anyway, please let me know what I'm missing here (which is probably a lot).

Even Virus authors contribute

Authors of malware are trying to exploit the good reputation of Wikipedia to infect PCs with their malicious software. In a mass e-mail, recipients were told to download a "security update" for windows from a Wikipedia site.

The attackers had used a Wikipedia feature that archives all previous versions of articles when changes have been made. The malicious page thus continued to exist in the archive, and the attackers were able to point to it in mass emails.

See here [heise.de] , here [techworld.com] and here [theregister.co.uk].

Okay, Brandt is learning.

This is how you fix the problems with Wikipedia: Point them out in a way that makes the problems easy to fix. Okay, it's probably still harder to get criticism against user conduct and policies reacted upon, but the way Wikipedia works, the content is still easy to fix. Especially in the case of plagiarism.

I really wish people would conduct accuracy and plagiarism studies a bit more often - especially when it's easy to fix, like this.

And by the way, Wikipedia recently got a bot that finds suspected plagiarism [wikipedia.org], which is pretty cool.

Turns out they weren't plagiarized...

They were just authored by Roland Piquepaille. His articles are always all his own work, so it must be a mistake in the program.

Statically unsignificant

Someone needs to brush up on stats.. Get back to us when the results are statistically analyzed to measure the results to determine are the results actually anything to worry about..

Plagiarism or Copyright?

Is plagiarism an issue for Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is not a PhD candidate. Wikipedia's job is to provide accurate information.
Of course, sources should be provided as well.
But legally, the real issue here is Copyright, isn't it?
"Plagiarism" and "Copyright infringement" are not synonyms.

There is no copyright in facts.
Therefore, nonfiction works are open to have the facts used in Wikipedia.
Where a verbatim transcription would not be fair use, someone needs to paraphrase.

Wikipedia bashing du jour

It seems to be th3 c00l3ss to bash Wiki lately, but the bottom line is there is no encyclopedic reference that comes close. The media and other pseudo-pundits who seem to resent any influential source of information that doesn't have obvious corporate influence (read: money-based control) as a major threat and they do whatever they can to discredit Wikipedia. Aside from a tiny subset of controversial articles that routinely get vandalized, and another tiny subset of plagiarism, this issue is likely to be blown way out of proportion by those who have a vested interest in destroying any information resource they cannot control.

Citations?

I tend to check the citations on Wikipedia. If there is no citation and I can't find a somewhat reliable source on Google related to the information I'm looking at -- I know I can't trust that information.

These people who ramble on that Wikipedia is inaccurate almost appear to me like they never sat history class in high-school. Where you have to verify your sources.

I've also never heard of citing encyclopedias in research projects, ever. Good-grade coursework, also never seen them cite encyclopedia entries (they may cite information that was cited to on some encyclopedias).

Here is the link to my report

Why is this news? Maybe because the Associated Press says it's news, and it's in hundreds of newspapers?

Why should Slashdotters care? Because while AP doesn't use links, Slashdot should have the courtesy of linking to the original sources that AP used to generate the report. (Plus AP also checked with Jimmy Wales for a reply, which is expected from professional reporters.)

The report is at http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/psamples.html [wikipedia-watch.org]

Wikipedia's own newsletter reports on it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_S ignpost/2006-10-30/Plagiarism_cleanup [wikipedia.org]

The efforts of Wikipedia administrators to clean up the mess are chronicled here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:W.marsh/list [wikipedia.org]

Of course, Slashdotters may continue shooting from the hip if they choose. It's what they do best.

Brandt vs. Wikipedia

Brandt has a long-standing (well, year-old) beef with Wikipedia. You can read about it, ironically enough, in the Wikipedia article about him [wikipedia.org].

He got into a dispute because he didn't like having his biography on WP (though it was constructed from publicly available news sources). He was generally combative and belligerent, and so was blocked and banned various times; check out the Talk archives for details. Afterwards he started a webpage where he attempted to list the real-world identities of the editors involved in the dispute.

Brandt is also the guy responsible for outing the anonymous editor in the Seigenthaler controversy.

Not an unflattering biography

Daniel Brandt is against Wikipedia's portrayal of him not because of it being unflattering (it is, in my opinion, if anything oddly sympathetic to his position, despite his position being that it shouldn't exist at all), but because of his privacy concerns. He's a privacy activist with a particular focus on the actions of information organizing sites, and so he's not unexpectedly against the existance of unauthorized widely-available detailed biographies. He's gone so far as to complain about CIA and NSA websites using cookies, so it's not surprising that he wouldn't be happy about a vast conspiracy to produce reports on unwilling individuals, regardless of the merits of the reports.

Wikipedia is now digg.com, without the credit!

This isn't surprising, seeing how _anybody_ can edit wikipedia. The inability to verify has always been an issue with wikipedia. Furthermore, I'm sure that most of these 'incidents' could be rectified by simply changing a few words and then referencing the source webpage. Then, instead of it being plagerism, it would be accountable reference work.

Bah.

http://what-is-what.com/what_is/digg.html [what-is-what.com]

Brandt's paper and Wikipedia's response

Brandt's original paper is here [wikipedia-watch.org], explaining his methodology and giving the complete list of articles he found. Wikipedia's response is here [wikipedia.org], where people go through the list one by one and also check the other contributions of users who have added copyrighted content. Wikipedia also has a bot [wikipedia.org] which aims to detect newly added copyright violations by searching Google.

142 isn't bad.

It's great this guy created a program to make it easier for them to avoid this problem.

That's the great thing about open source and projects like wiki.

You encounter a problem, it's very easy for people to fix it quickly.

If those 142 items are real, they are probably already being fixed now if not all fixed.

Brandt's odd sayings

"They present it as an encyclopedia," Brandt said Friday.

Well, yes. Not that odd, really, given that it is an encyclopedia.

"They go around claiming it's almost as good as Britannica."

Actually, Wikipedians don't, in my experience. Most are quite sober when it comes to comparisons with Britannica. Brandt may be referring to the journal Nature, which did make such a claim for science articles.

They are trying to be mainstream respectable.
Wikipedia is already pretty darn mainstream, and if by "respectable" Brandt means "free of plagiarised material", then he's correct.

Well

I hope they didn't count the sites that mirror Wikipedia's content as their own (answers.com I think it is that is notorious).

If you equate good with referenced

"They present it as an encyclopedia," Brandt said Friday. "They go around claiming it's almost as good as Britannica. They are trying to be mainstream respectable."

Whether something is plagerized or not, doesn't really impact the quality of it. If someone copied a great article into Wikipedia, then Wikipedia has a great article - just through foul play. There's previously been comparisons which have shown Wikipedia to be just as accurate as Britannica. Now, it's been a while since I looked at a dictionary, but from what I can tell Wikipedia has far more external references than your average encyclopedia. I guess mostly because a wikipedia page has little credibility on its own. So both as a reference and as a starting point it's better, what remains is just whether it's "respectable". With 99% own content, you can hardly say they've been using this as a strategy. I don't know what you could compare it with, it's as if one linux app copied some code, and someone called Red Hat not respectable for distributing it despite being completely unaware. Or better yet, tried to imply that their business is built on stolen software. What's next? "I can find text copied without permission on google. They're eeeeeeeeeeevil"?

Other concerns about Wikipedia

In the Encyclopaedia Britannica and other published, for-sale reference works, the articles' sources are not only attributed, but the author of the article is attributed and his/her credentials displayed as a guide to their qualifications in providing the article.

Now, an article presenting facts can be written by someone who has no academic qualifications but still represents the facts fairly and accurately, so I don't claim that a person MUST be academically qualified to write a good article, nor do I claim that an article is good just because a person with "academic" qualifications writes it. However, I believe that the articles' authors should be identified, and the article parts should be identified as primary, secondary or tertiary.

I go to the Wikipedia for information, but I'm cautious. I want to be able to cite the information in the Wikipedia, and that requires authors and accurate attribution.

Plagarism is common but usually promotional

Plagarism shows up frequently in Wikipedia, but usually it's promotional. Typically, company X copied their "about" page into Wikipedia. Bands and musicians, usually ones that are a legend only in their own minds, try this. A new user associated with the thing being promoted is usually responsible.

Then there are the people with a collector mindset. They create endless minor articles like "Indiana State Highway 22" and biographical articles of long-forgotten city council members. Often by cutting and pasting. This is annoying, but complaints of copyright infringement are unlikely.

Ug another techono geek tries to prove he's smart.

Alright, we've seen this before. Someone writes a prgoram to prove something, then runs it, dances around with the results and says, "Hey look over here, I proved that Wikipedia is stealing info from other sites..." But he leaves off his results, how the code works or how he verified that his results were accurate. What if the site that he's crediting the source material with was really the one who stole it in the first place? How many generations and cross matches did he perform? Is it per word and ordered matching, or does it consider the phrases: "We went to work today" and "Went to work today" to be same?
If you'ver going to run an article like this and expect people to take it seriously, we need details. LOTS OF DETAILS.
Does my comment mean I don't think some of the content is uncredited, or stolen? No, it probably is, but anytime anyone presents what amounts to an experiement, it should be held to a scientific standard and subject to peer review, otherwise you end up with a bunch of people thinking something that is fact, is not, and something that is not fact is. People need to be reminded to think critically when we see articles like this, or any article that makes a claim based on "my research" or "my program". Just because you made an experiement that proves your hypothesis, doesn't mean it proves anything. I want more details, I want to review his findings, I want to review his process, and I want to see how deep he dug before he claimed that something in the public domain was actually not credited to its source.

How does he know?

If I wrote an article on some subject and then decided to share that information with Wikipedia, I may well just copy my text verbatim. Does that make it plagiarism? If I wrote the text, why can't I reuse it? How does this guy know that's not what's going on here?

Wikipedia less than perfect...

Can it still move forward? More at 11.

Who is Daniel Brandt anyway?

You might like to know that Daniel Brandt [wikipedia.org] founded Google Watch back in the old days to protest against page rank. Yes, Google Watch was originally just against how Google didn't give mr Brandt a good page rank. Now he added some bits about privacy but I think anyone should visit Google Watch now to see how childish Daniel Brandt is. And using Google to do datamining is against the acceptable use policy anyway.

So?

Wikipedia is a free and open source of information for all people. I'm all for it if they get decent data off of somewhere else. I'd like it if it was more properly bibliographized or whatever, but that seems like small potatoes over the background of what it is that wikipedia is attempting to be for the world.

What stupid text book industry shill came up with this crack pot survey? And as somebody else pointed out ~1% of plagiarism isn't exactly high in my opinion.

Stop being an asshole, and if you DO find plagiarism, label it as such, and give us a better footnote as to where the original information came from.

Jesus!

rhY

I'd say this numerically proves its superiiority

only 140 something out of 12,000 articles were plagarized?

Wow.

I seem to remember from high school that the major dictionaries sometimes put made up words in their dictionaries in order to catch plagaristic competing dictionary makers. Similarly they'll add an extra fake definition to a word, and then watch over the next decade or two to see if another dictionary picks up the fake definition.

Encyclopedias do the same. Add some small tidbit of fake information to an article to see if it surfaces somewhere else.

I don't believe the dictionary and encyclopedia publishers do this by accident...they do it because they have experienced such things before and found this to be a very easy way to prove stupidity and plagarism on the other person's part.

Honestly...I think less then 200 our of over 12,000 articles is actually proving that it is quite good...and indeed non-plagarised. Especially considering that wiki articles tend to be significantly longer, more in depth, and with more recent and politically charged items in it...I think it proves quite a large degree of integrity on wikipedia's part.

Irony, pick up the white courtesy phone...

Am I the only one who finds it vaguely humorous that the same Daniel Brandt who wants to bust Google's balls [google-watch.org] has to use Google in his campaign to bust Wikipedia's balls [wikipedia-watch.org]?

I have a problem with this part of the article...

But editors found extensive problems in several cases, with many still not yet fully checked. Articles with offending passages have been stripped of most text. An entire paragraph in Alonzo Clark's entry, for instance, was deleted, leaving the article with the bare-bones: "Alonzo M. Clark (August 13, 1868-October 12, 1952) was an American politician who was Governor of Wyoming from 1931 to 1933." The original article, Brandt said, was copied from a biography on the Wyoming state government site.

Uh, OK, but there really isn't anything wrong with that, as long as it's cited. If it's on the Wyoming state government site, it's public domain. Works that the government puts out should all be public domain. (Taxpayers .. paid for them. There is no copyright.)

Plagiarism the myth the fact.

I hope this isn't modded as flame bait, becuase I'm really being honest here in my argument. So, I'll get down to it.

First, American education enforces plagiarism. That's right! How so? Well, take for instance the fact that almost every test in any mundane American education facility almost always encourages the student to regurgitate a canned answer from a designated source of information. It gets even worse when you enter the University level, and is unbelievably worse yet, if you enter any top tier Univeristy (where the professors themselves demand you buy *their* book).

Even if such a class exists, as "Critical Thinking", there's really nothing truely critical about it. Factor into the above facts with another fact that American and European societies are bent on "Political Correctness". This only serves to deter true critical thinking, becuase any deterance or compelling factor to NOT speak you mind, regardless of how vulgar it is, is taking away from the full spectrum of perceptive analysis. Even acadamia is infected with this little bit, that's why you never see any books dedicated to the good things about Hitler, the bad things about Ghandi, even though any person in their right mind shall admit, even if in private, that Yin and Yang did not ellude either of the two. There's a formula for the above. If X is a positive admission, Y is a negative admission and Z is the general image you are trying to paint the person in (where Z is a magnitude of either X or Y), any X/Y granted that is not a magnitude of Z, then the opposite SHALL be grotesquely over exaggerated as to make the other negligable. That's why, not one single historian or author is willing to point out