[LINK] Wikipedia Critic Finds Copied Passages

[Kim Holburn]

142 articles doesn't sound like a big deal really.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/11/04/1162340080487.html

> Wikipedia Critic Finds Copied Passages
> November 4, 2006 - 8:20AM
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>
> A critic of an online encyclopedia written and edited by its users  
> has identified dozens of biographical articles that appear to  
> contain passages lifted from other sites, prompting its  
> administrators to delete several pending a review.
>
> 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.
>
> The site's founder, Jimmy Wales, acknowledged that plagiarized  
> passages do occasionally slip in but he dismissed Brandt's findings  
> as exaggerated.
>
> Wikipedia allows anyone to post, edit and even delete items  
> regardless of expertise and leaves it to other users to catch  
> factual errors and other problems, including plagiarism.
>
> Although plagiarism and copyright infringement are common among  
> sites with user-generated content, Brandt said Wikipedia must be  
> held to a higher standard, a point with which Wales agreed.
>
> "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."
>
> 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. The site currently has nearly 1.5  
> million in the English language alone.
>
> Wales said plagiarism is always possible in a site that offers  
> "wide-open editing ... but in general we take a very strong anti- 
> plagiarism stance." Any time plagiarism is brought to the site's  
> attention, he said, Wikipedia administrators review all postings  
> made by that author.
>
> Wikipedia editors have been reviewing the 142 articles in question  
> and have declared a handful to be OK because copied passages came  
> from the public domain. Editors found others where Wikipedia  
> appeared to be the one plagiarized.
>
> 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.

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