A plagiarism scandal is unfolding in the crossword puzzle world

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-plagiarism-scandal-is-unfolding-in-the-crossword-world/

by k4jh • 10 years ago

111 41 10 years ago

programd• 10 years ago

Crosswords ara a beautiful example of a rich data set which can be sliced and diced in many interesting statistical ways. I wonder if a data visualization wizard out there can come up with some high impact graphics to illustrate the problems uncovered in this story. Maybe a job for the terrific New York Times data visualization team? Given that it appears that the NYT was plagiarized that would be some poetic justice indeed.

n0us• 10 years ago

'made him a “multimillionaire.”'

Certainly an interesting way to make money. I wonder exactly how he managed to do this.

cfcef• 10 years ago

I wonder about the legal aspects. The reuse in one set of cases may be legal, but what about the others? If nothing else, you would think that the NYT or USA Today would have a clause in their contracts that puzzles are guaranteed new and unique...

Ftuuky• 10 years ago

I love reading about scandals like this one or the tennis online betting one. Data scientists are going to ruin so many schemes and frauds.

hanoz• 10 years ago

Can't see anyone getting away with this in the world of British cryptic crosswords somehow. Any repetition within living memory would surely be met by an en masse raised eyebrow.

wpietri• 10 years ago

The New Yorker just had a great story about cheating in Bridge, with a similar theme of digital technology suddenly making it much easier to detect and expose shenanigans that would have otherwise gone unnoticed:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/07/the-cheating-pr...

halo8• 10 years ago

It has been drilled into us that plagiarism is theft and therefore bad, but there is nothing more natural in the world than taking others work and building on it or sharing it. Ownership of thoughts and ideas is a modern invention, and harmless "plagiarism" has been going on since the dawn of time. Not every sentence, idea, story or indeed puzzle should need to have a wholly original formulation, and it's not hard to see how stringent citations might stifle creativity or distract from the ideas being presented.

In particular, I wonder to what degree this sort of plagiarism causes any real harm, repeating others clever ideas from years ago in a way that can only be discovered by data mining. Are the puzzles less fun knowing they have shared elements with ones from years ago?

forrestthewoods2• 10 years ago

Plagiarism is wildly overrated.

I remember in middle/high school writing research papers for English class. I spent more time trying to NOT plagiarize than I spent on any other aspect of the paper. Which doubly absurd when you consider that there is literally not a single original thought a 14 year old is capable of having with respect to the War of 1812. When the entirety of my knowledge on a subject is based on a half dozen sources how the hell can I not plagiarize.

In that instance I say plagiarize away! Focus on idea sharing. On how to explain complex ideas to your classmates. On how to build consistent abstractions or arguments. On literally anything other than how to rewrite the three sentences so it says the same thing as those three sentences but with different words so you don't get kicked out of school.

jmduke• 10 years ago

This sounds like a failure of your teacher/grader, not like a failure of the idea of plagiarism, though?

Focus on idea sharing. On how to explain complex ideas to your classmates. On how to build consistent abstractions or arguments.

100% agreed! And I think most cogent interpretations of plagiarism would say that if you're able to do those things then you're not plagiarising, you're building off of other sources (providing that you cite them correctly).

(It's entirely possible that I've been lucky, and that my teachers/professors took unusually rational stances when it came to this kind of thing. But it feels like you're presenting a false dichotomy.)

SOLAR_FIELDS• 10 years ago

All ideas are built upon.

There is a very clear line between simply copy pasting an idea and reformulating that idea in your own words.

I agree that we should focus more on coming up with ideas independently, and that if they so happen to coincide with an idea someone came up before, no big deal.

In today's diverse world, however, what are the chances that you were even remotely going to say something word for word how someone else before you said it?

pdpi• 10 years ago

You don't need to have _original_ ideas. You can summarise the ideas from some other source (or, ideally, sources). In summarising, you make some choices as to what you think is important, and what you think is immaterial. You explain the core concepts in your own words, maybe differently from the source material. And, if you're quoting from a specific source verbatim, you acknowledge it.

Plagiarism is not about the copying in and of itself. It's about appropriating somebody else's work and pretending it's yours.

mcguire• 10 years ago

Note that plagiarism involves not citing your sources.

How do you feel when someone claims your ideas as their own?

sigmar2• 10 years ago

It has been drilled into us that plagiarism is theft and therefore bad, but there is nothing more natural in the world than taking others work and building on it or sharing it.

While I generally agree with this sentence. It is fairly obvious that he wasn't "building on it and sharing it." It seems he was changing a few words then putting his name on it and profiting by selling the intellectual property (that he doesn't own).

halo8• 10 years ago

Disagree, the core contention is he was copying clue themes from past puzzles (or self-plagiarising, which is a slightly different issue), not copying entire puzzles. That's a far cry from what you describe.

I don't really have a huge problem with that, even if he's selling it. Yes, it's plagiarism, yes, it's copying, yes, it's considered "intellectual property theft". No, I don't see why it should be considered such a big deal, nor do I think every crossword benefits from being created entirely from scratch at additional effort.

If someone comes up with a great clue theme and someone notices a few years later and reuses it for others to enjoy, why should I get angry about plagiarism rather that feel happy that a great idea has been shared?

blisterpeanuts• 10 years ago

In music, art, and dance, you will see themes inspired if not outright copied; that's the reason for the existence of styles. Rock and roll music is full of borrowed riffs, copied drum patterns, etc. Almost all 70's disco music used very similar drum patterns. I think this kind of thing is OK and necessary, actually, to allow an art form to evolve.

But to wholesale copy 90% or 95% of someone's creation, as in some of the examples in the article, crosses a line. Imagine someone wholesale copying the famous opening guitar riff from Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven -- there would be outrage from the fans, and undoubtedly a lawsuit would follow.

I think the only reason this fellow Parker has gotten away with it for so long is that he's in a more obscure field where it's a lot less obvious to uncover plagiarism without an intentional check, as someone has finally done.

“We don’t look at anybody else’s puzzles or really care about anyone else’s puzzles,” Parker said.

I don't believe that for one second. Someone in the profession for all these years, and he never looks at NYT puzzles?

halo8• 10 years ago

Led Zeppelin famously copied, adapted and evolved others people's songs, leading to legal issues on songs including Stairway to Heaven. I'm suggesting they had it right in the first place and our obsession with "plagiarism" is wrong-headed.

deveac• 10 years ago

You must have been being coy when you wrote that ;)

Led Zeppelin Loses First Round of Plagarism Lawsuit: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/led-zeppelin-loses-first-round-i...

mikeash• 10 years ago

Plagiarism isn't merely taking someone else's work. Plagiarism is a lack of acknowledgment that you've done so. It's lying by omission, not theft. You can even plagiarize yourself, by taking something you did before and presenting it as something new.

harshreality• 10 years ago

I'm going to focus on plagiarism in non-fiction.

In some circumstances, readers need to be able to evaluate an author's work for originality or contribution to the state of the art. If paraphrased or word-for-word ideas aren't quoted, the reader doesn't know if the line of argument is 1% new or 100% new.

Plagiarism—in a context where someone's work is being evaluated (generally, in academia or non-fiction publishing)—is a deliberate confusion of who contributed what to the argument being made. Which matters for evaluation of rationally presented ideas, to understand where arguments are coming from so criticism of those ideas can be located more easily.

If the thesis is taken from someone else, that's a gross abuse of academic standards. If you want to defend someone else's thesis on different grounds than they defended it, you can do so, but it should be made explicit that that's what you're doing, which entails citing the source of the thesis in some explicit way.

Furthermore, by citing sources, if a reader appreciates one line of thought but not what's built around it, they can go to that other source or author and start down a different path. Failing to cite sources makes that more difficult. IF it's recognized as most likely a quote, and IF the original source has high pagerank, it's easy to find. If not, you have to go consult academics in the area in question to see if they recognize it, or query the author to do what he or she should have done in the first place: cite the source.

I don't view it as theft, or anything like that. More like abuse or a waste of the reader's time and intellectual effort in trying to evaluate a complex argument without hints about the geneology of the component ideas.

WalterBright• 10 years ago

The older I get, the more nebulous the concept that someone can own an idea.

Kiro• 10 years ago

I don't understand the problem with "shoddy" crosswords. It's edited by the same person so what's the big deal? Are you not allowed to repeat a crossword?

ubernostrum• 10 years ago

I've occasionally used daily-crossword sites as a way to relax and keep my mind working when I need to take a break from code, and the repetitiveness is one of the big drawbacks.

Crossword puzzles have a certain vocabulary of words which are rare in conversational English but appear with high frequency in puzzles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crosswordese -- how many times have you used 'olio' or 'etui' in conversation?), and poor/mass-produced crosswords take this to an extreme, which in turn takes both the challenge and the fun out of the puzzle.

Also, if you do enough puzzles you will end up noticing ones which are more subtly repetitive, and again there's less fun in re-solving one you've already "done".

jordanpg2• 10 years ago

Non-repetitiveness is precisely what makes a crossword good. If you are seeing a lot of repetitiveness, you are doing the wrong puzzles.

jordanpg2• 10 years ago

Longtime NYT solver here.

The most interesting thing about this to me is that it belies the common impression that many have that the NYT crossword is "elitist". I mean, how can it be "elitist" if it's routinely copied by USA Today??

I think people try it, find it to be impossible to penetrate on the first try, see a couple of clues about 1930's opera or NYC-specific stuff and then punt. However, like many other things in life, there is a learning curve to basic competency. There is a common, shared vocabulary among professional crossword constructors that provides a foundation for even the most difficult puzzles. The point is that you can still finish the puzzle even without knowing anything about 1930's opera by knowing something else nearby and some intelligent guesses.

Among most solvers, the quality of a puzzle is proportional to how fun it is to solve and that is closely related to non-repetition of the theme. Good puzzles minimize this and solvers take it for granted that every puzzle will be genuinely new. The best case is a theme that is never before seen, something completely original.

The problem with plagiarism in this case is easier to understand if it's seen through the lens of an inveterate solver. It's a betrayal of this unspoken (but still very casual) ethic of originality.

See almost any post from: http://rexwordpuzzle.blogspot.com/ for an example of typical daily thoughts along these lines.

fenomas• 10 years ago

impression that many have that the NYT crossword is "elitist"

If that's the case, I imagine it's partly due to it not being widely known that the difficulty of the puzzles follows a set schedule[1]. People pick up a Saturday puzzle, very reasonably suppose that future puzzles will be similar, and write off the whole business.

[1] Easiest on Monday, ramping up to hardest on Saturday, with Sunday somewhere in the middle, for anyone else unaware.

bbanyc• 10 years ago

The NYT crossword has a steep difficulty curve increasing over each week. It took me a few years of regular solving before I could consistently finish a Saturday puzzle. If people are only seeing the NYT puzzles on weekends, no wonder they think it's elitist. Try a Monday puzzle!

(Also, the obscure 1930's opera references have been on the decline since Will Shortz took over for the late Eugene T. Maleska. Maleska was an admitted elitist who filled the puzzles with high culture, while Shortz prefers misleading wordplay. You see a 5-letter clue, "Pentagonal part of a diamond", and it takes a while for the baseball reference to click - but once it does, PLATE is the obvious answer.)

I've looked at the USA Today crossword a few times, but found the quality relatively poor. Lots of dull clues and obscure three-letter words to make the fill fit together. No wonder he got away with plagiarism for so long, the people who'd notice wouldn't bother sticking around long enough to find anything wrong.

iconjack• 10 years ago

Back in the 90s, there was a piece in Wired by Will Shortz about then-president Bill Clinton's crossword prowess—he claimed he could solve the NYT puzzle in about 10 minutes, if I recall. But readers who would care about this would also know that there's no comparison in difficulty between a Monday and a Friday. Which puzzle could the president do in 10 minutes? I couldn't believe Will Shortz of all people would leave this out.

A plagiarism scandal is unfolding in the crossword puzzle world

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