Chris Anderson's Free Contains Apparent Plagiarism

http://www.vqronline.org/blog/2009/06/23/chris-anderson-free/

by razorburn • 17 years ago

55 36 17 years ago

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

The sidebar displays of textual comparisons in the submitted article are very interesting, as is the attribution of the Wikipedia entries.

gruseom4• 17 years ago

Given Anderson's response that he screwed up and his plausible explanation, the article's gotcha title and the way that it's structured (first as a pompous "investigation", then springing this critical information on the reader at the end) strike me as a little unfair. Obviously what he did was wrong, but it was pretty clearly sloppiness rather than theft or deceit. (Edit: either that or a very clever coverup of a very stupid crime.)

ojbyrne• 17 years ago

Sorry, but if you're trained as a journalist, it is.

sachinag3• 17 years ago

This. How on earth you could have an explanation that's essentially "I relied on my memory to figure out the quoted cites after the fact that I deleted the cites because I couldn't find a fucking cite format" is insane. The dude pretty willfully plagarized as far as I'm concerned. I mean, seriously, fucking Google has this as their first hit for [cite online sources]: http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/citex.html

Now, look, Doris Kearns Goodwin got nailed plagarizing, too. She did her penance, and now she's back on TV and everything after putting out Team of Rivals, which was seminal. Anderson will have to do something similar.

What's striking is that if you make it to the top of the profession, you can get away with this. If you're 28 and toiling to work your way up, it's a death sentence.

gruseom4• 17 years ago

"Training as a journalist" is a joke. Pretty much every article I've had firsthand knowledge of has contained errors so egregious that it wouldn't take any training at all to have avoided them, only basic intelligence and diligence. Sorry, but that profession richly deserves its current collapse.

Given that, I find Anderson's screwup with footnotes no more objectionable than the critic's self-interested attempt to drum up a scandal out of it. It's not like the book gains anything by not citing a few Wikipedia articles; given its genre (popular economics) it would in fact be more convincing with them than without them. If it were claiming original scholarship it would be a different story.

Anyway, my point isn't really to defend authorial sloppiness in shallow throwaway bestsellers. I just didn't like the bait-and-switch in the gotcha piece. (Or its self-importance. "Investigation?" Please.)

Edit: ok, my conscience made me go back and reread the VQR piece to see if it was all that obnoxious. And it says it wasn't really and I have to add that here. In a footnote. :)

Alex3917• 17 years ago

As someone who isn't a trained journalist, who cares? It's not like it makes the book any less good.

newsio• 17 years ago

It is a very clever coverup of a very stupid crime.

The publisher's PR team was on this faster than you can say media disaster. Get "Oops, I goofed" out there as quickly as possible while shifting blame to someone or something else (software, confusion over citation format, whatever).

If this happened to one of Anderson's own writers at Wired, I suspect he or she would be out of a job just as quickly.

brandnewlow5• 17 years ago

Note to tech bloggers: want a story that gets hits this week? Find an example of someone sacked from Wired for plagiarism and run a compare/contrast of their iniquity vs. this one.

gruseom4• 17 years ago

Except that "crime" and "plagiarism" imply (to my mind) an intent to deceive, or at least acting consciously. That doesn't strike me as very likely. It would mean that Anderson is an idiot in at least two ways: thinking he wouldn't get caught ripping stuff off Wikipedia, and taking a big risk for trivial gain.

sfphotoarts• 17 years ago

someone should do an LCS on the electronic version and submit the results to Wired :)

pchristensen• 17 years ago

Caught another plagiarist a few days ago here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661875

Seems like you could catch a lot of plagiarism by doing a sentence-by-sentence google search of a submitted work. Probably against Google's ToS but it would probably turn up a lot of dirt.

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

You're onto something here - and Google has already digitized many, many books. This has enormous potential value as a collaborative endeavor; Google might not object if they were made a party to it and the search conducted at a low intensity. Alternatively, some kind of peer-based comparison a la BOINC ought to be possible. It has value beyond simple plagiarism detection.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

Why do you think that would be against Google's ToS? I wouldn't guess so.

pj2• 17 years ago

Well, if he did this with content licensed under the ShareAlike, then he has to release his book the same way. Right?

Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Comm...

gojomo3• 17 years ago

It doesn't work that way; copyleft/ShareAlike is not a automatic trap that can be applied to your work against your will. It's a condition for permitted reuse.

If you violate the condition, then you have no permission to use. Then, since you've used without permission, the copyright holder can sue you for damages, and/or to stop/mitigate the violation.

The copyright holder might propose that relicensing your work under copyleft/ShareAlike would be sufficient penance for them to settle. But it's not automatic -- "you used X, thus your work in now licensed as X demanded".

pj2• 17 years ago

So if he had said, "I got this from this wikipedia article," then his book would also have been ShareAlike?

Maybe he didn't want that... I don't understand really, did he think no one would find out? What is his response? I looked on thelongtail.com but don't see anything.

graemep• 17 years ago

The copyright belongs to the contributors, which means that any of the people who wrote the plagiarised sections may sue, but Wikipedia cannot.

Tichy2• 17 years ago

But on the other hand, to legally quote Wikipedia the book would have to be ShareAlike licensed, too? I think that is quite shocking, I thought Wikipedia was more open than that.

devin• 17 years ago

No one takes into account that it may have been his publisher's wish to not include wikipedia citations.

jon_dahl• 17 years ago

That could be, but it would still be a violation of Wikipedia's licensing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Comm...

Tichy2• 17 years ago

Do I read it correctly that to quote from Wikipedia, the work containing the quote has to be put under the ShareAlike license, too? (Similar to the GPL?). I am quite shocked, as I had expected the license for Wikipedia stuff to be more lenient.

billswift• 17 years ago

I have tried (am trying) to write a book, and find Anderson's explanation totally believable. Search and Replace is NOT your friend if you don't use it intelligently. What apparently happened is the publisher decided not to use footnotes, but instead of using the footnotes to locate the relevant cites and fixing them (citing them inline or removing them) first, deleted all footnotes, then they tried to locate all the cited text from memory. Poor planning and sloppy editing was the direct cause of the plagiarism, not intent.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

If the author keeps his raw notes in the proper way for a nonfiction book manuscript, the publisher can't undermine him in the claimed way.

jcl• 17 years ago

This is the same guy who fabricated a quote from Peter Norvig to fill in a logical gap in his article:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=492376

Chris Anderson's Free Contains Apparent Plagiarism

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