[LINK] Wikipedia Critic Finds Copied Passages

andrew clarke mail at ozzmosis.com
Tue Nov 7 04:47:43 AEDT 2006


On Mon, Nov 06, 2006 at 05:02:38PM +1100, Kim Holburn wrote:

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

Yep - I'm sure there are thousands more, but still just a drop in the
ocean compared to the total number of articles.

> http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/11/04/1162340080487.html
> 
> >Wikipedia Critic Finds Copied Passages
> >November 4, 2006 - 8:20AM

...

> >"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."

I never got that impression about Wikipedia, but either way, what is
more important is that its users (both editors and readers) understand
its limitations.

> >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.

Presumably Brandt just has an axe to grind, as obviously he too can
rewrite or remove the plagiarised text, if he wishes, without making a
fuss in the mainstream media about it.  This will only backfire on him
though, since this is the sort of publicity only encourages more people
to use Wikipedia...

> >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.

...

> >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.

It may be that the Wikipedia user who contributed the text to this
article considered the information on the US government site to be in
the public domain.  It is my understanding that this is true for at
least some US government publications, ie. there is no copyright.

Perhaps it would've been a non-issue if the user employed a bit of
"creative writing" to rewrite the plagiarised text - enough to be an
original composition - before they submitted it.  Of course there is
still nothing stopping someone from doing that in future.

Regards
Andrew



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