Wikipedia and Plagiarism 267
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.'"
That doesn't seem like alot (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That doesn't seem like alot (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds like much ado about nothing once more. *yawn*
Re:That doesn't seem like alot (Score:4, Insightful)
Daniel Brandt, valuable Wikipedia contributor (Score:5, Insightful)
"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine..." -- Obi Wiki-nobi
US Gov copyright? (Score:2, Insightful)
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...?
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That doesn't seem like alot (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering that an audit of dead-tree encyclopedias hasn't been done, we can't say. What we CAN say is that its foolish to make a comparison with Britannica, when an audit of Britannica found 10% of 600 articles to be non-factual. The sources cited in those 10% disavowed the articles' contents.
This isn't all that surprising either, when you think about it. People cite people who cite people, and someone somewhere will mis-interpret what someone else wrote, or come to different conclusions while still citing the original author.
Re:US Gov copyright? (Score:4, Insightful)
(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.
What Brandt _should_ do, rather than crowing (Score:3, Insightful)
Is release the script or code that he used to generate his 142 plagiarised articles out of 12,000.
Such a script, if tuned and more widely applied, could be extraordinarily useful in weeding out future instances of plagiarism.
142 articles flagged, 142 articles fixed within hours. That's Wikipedia working as no dead-tree encyclopedia can.
Of course, Brandt would never do anything as useful as that, but will probably content himself with continuing to "shoot from the hip" and claim this as a blow against the Wikipedia community, rather than a bravura demonstration of exactly how well it works.