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Unless you're doing the Hyperion/Satyr contrast thing, putting Borges and Houellebecq in the same context is always a problem, but: 1. A cento is a poetical wo

Unless you're doing the Hyperion/Satyr contrast thing, putting Borges and Houellebecq in the same context is always a problem, but: 1. A cento is a poetical work wholly composed of verses or passages taken from other authors; only disposed in a new form or order. 2. The above statement is an example of plagiarism on my part, although I cannot determine exactly who I'm plagiarizing. It appears in a few places. Wikipedia stitches the sentence together with a list of examples that it takes from another source, but it doesn't give any attribution for the actual definition. 3. One of Flamarrion's points (cited in the French slate) was precisely that you cannot identify the author responsible for much of the text in Wiki. 4. Citiing wikipedia as the source of something is like citing Dasani as the source of your drinking water (which of course doesn't mean you shouldn't do it). 5. If you want another neat example look up French Wikipedia's discussion of the Hoellebecq affair, which repeats in brief, without scrupulous attribution, the basic argument of M. Glad's article, citing the latter only as the source of the last sentence of its paragraph. 6. I meant to just make the point about the Cento, but got a bit carried away, so: tl;dr: writers do this all the time and plagiarizing Wiki is like cheating on Tiger Woods.

gwern 16y ago
> 3. One of Flamarrion's points (cited in the French slate) was precisely that you cannot identify the author responsible for much of the text in Wiki. Huh? You can identify the author for Wikipedia text in greater and finer detail than for pretty much any other text ever created, down to the character and second. The name of the author may not be familiar to you, but it is a name regardless; the name on the cover of a book isn't trustworthy either, and Wikipedia is actually superior in that there is no 'Anonymous' (every contribution is linked to a pseudonym or an IP address, the latter of which can convey remarkable amounts of information). I feel as if someone had come up to me and asked me, 'What if Shakespeare's plays were not written by William Shakespeare but by another man of the same name?' Also, when Tiger Woods deletes 10k articles just to be sure that the content is clean from a copyright perspective (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents/CCI#Implementing_bot.3F http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_not...), then you may peddle your specious analogies.
- pigbucket 16y ago
  Your inordinately thoughtful response to a few glib comments merits a better reply than this necessarily incomplete one. Intended to be constative, not interrogative, those comments arouse in you nonetheless the doubtless frustrating and noxious feeling of being asked a question both odd in the extreme and tangential to the intended tenor of my remarks, but I'm happy to take responsibility, and in case it weighs too heavily would add that if Shakespeare's plays really were discovered to have been written not by the man discussed in, among a thousand other places, an inspired, if not plagiarized, article by Wikipedia, but by another man of the same name, then of more interest and pertinence in the context of our discussion would not be what would happen (to endless pages of biographical criticism, or to truckloads of new grist for English doctoral mills, or to sad Stratford, or to inspired if unplagiarized Wikipedia articles) but what would not happen: crucially, there would be no change in the fact that the plays are full of plagiarized ideas, arguments, words, phrases and sentences, nor in the fact that the plays have in turn been plagiarized throughout the subsequent history of literature to such an extent that Shakespeare's phrases have now become part of the reservoir of everyday unattributed, if not plagiarized, cliches. It was surely wrong of me to stress that plagiarism can rise even to the level of a genre such as the Cento, when typically it is just the quotidian business of literary writers brazenly to steal (should I acknowledge here also that this claim might be taken to evoke Steve Jobs' invocation of Picasso's likely-borrowed idea that great artists brazenly steal from others all the time and that this is one of their defining traits?). And if I could muster, for the sake of decorum as much as argument, the ability to take the whole question seriously for a second, I would still be forced to say that Houellebecq's plagiarism is traditional not anomalous, and its identification as a species of theft would be downright banal even if trivially true, which fact M. Glad, though responsible in the first place for raising the whole business to the status of an "affair," has the good sense at least implicitly to acknowledge. I would probably want to add, maintaining this unlikely seriousness, that literary plagiarism has great literary value, that Shakespeare is better for having stolen from Montaigne, and that Montaigne's ideas are themselves enlivened, even improved, when uttered by Shakespearean characters whose motivations are more clear, and whose claims are subject to refutation by the deeds or words of other characters."I wake and feel the fell of night, not day," to take another example that would appear arbitrary only to those who don't know what I was up to last night, is a line with altogether different meanings and effects in Ashbery's cento "The Dong with the Luminous Nose" from its meanings and effects in the Hopkins poem from which it is lifted. Now H. plagiarizes Wikipedia, and if I were a better person, more worthy of mouthing moralizing pieties, more self-righteously sure of my own unadulterated originality at every juncture, more appreciative at least of the less than (as you point out) anonymous horde's unacknowledged (doubtless original and impeccably documented, inspired if not plagiarized) explication of the fly's reproductive activities, and if I agree at the same time that H. is no Borges, just as Ashbery fails to breathe the rare and lofty poetic air where Hopkins dwells, I still wouldn't give much of a fly's arse. All of which, I hope, can be taken as grounds for forgiving the lack of energy and honor I bring to the task of defending an obvious if throwaway and in good part irrelevant claim that Wikipedia is full of plagiarism (I was silent on whether it infringes copyright). But presumably no defense or citation is needed for the weaker claim that the possibility of plagiarism, like the possibility of vandalism, is a condition of the possibility of Wikipedia, and is the obvious reason for what I am sure is its perpetual and heroic vigilance, of which you cite an admirable instance. I still don't know what exactly to infer from that 10k-page expurgation you mention, but here's an apparently meaningful quotation from the discussion to which you were kind enough to link: "As near as we can tell, everything this person [Darius] has written that is longer than a few sentences is a copyvio. This means that the well of articles he has created -- barring the ones that are simple lists of data -- are, quite simply, poisoned foundations upon which we're letting others build." On this evidence, it seems this was less a case of purging pages "just to be sure," as you say, that there were no copyright violations, than a case of purging because it looked like an egregious case. Your personal reasons for thinking this was all merely precautionary and therefore, apparently, if I read you correctly, evidence of a Wikipedia unsoiled by silently borrowed thoughts, rather than a case of dealing with an extreme example of a possibly pervasive problem, would be of some interest to me--though I say that despite the fact that in general questions of whether Wikipedia plagiarizes (seriously, is that a question? do we need to look for examples?), or whether it is plagiarized, when measured against its undeniable and immeasurable value are as trivial (to me) as the infidelities of a person such as Woods when measured against his immeasurable talent. Finally, I cannot restrain my imagination from wandering down the path that leads to the fantasy of Mr. Woods frantically trying to shred ten thousand incriminating documents, so in the case of our reaching the end of that improbable path, can I rely on your being back in the market for my specious analogies, of which I have a practically inexhaustible supply in dire need of peddling? tl;dr? Leave out the adjectives and adverbs

gwern 16y ago

> 3. One of Flamarrion's points (cited in the French slate) was precisely that you cannot identify the author responsible for much of the text in Wiki. Huh? You can identify the author for Wikipedia text in greater and finer detail than for pretty much any other text ever created, down to the character and second. The name of the author may not be familiar to you, but it is a name regardless; the name on the cover of a book isn't trustworthy either, and Wikipedia is actually superior in that there is no 'Anonymous' (every contribution is linked to a pseudonym or an IP address, the latter of which can convey remarkable amounts of information). I feel as if someone had come up to me and asked me, 'What if Shakespeare's plays were not written by William Shakespeare but by another man of the same name?' Also, when Tiger Woods deletes 10k articles just to be sure that the content is clean from a copyright perspective (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents/CCI#Implementing_bot.3F http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_not...), then you may peddle your specious analogies.

pigbucket 16y ago
Your inordinately thoughtful response to a few glib comments merits a better reply than this necessarily incomplete one. Intended to be constative, not interrogative, those comments arouse in you nonetheless the doubtless frustrating and noxious feeling of being asked a question both odd in the extreme and tangential to the intended tenor of my remarks, but I'm happy to take responsibility, and in case it weighs too heavily would add that if Shakespeare's plays really were discovered to have been written not by the man discussed in, among a thousand other places, an inspired, if not plagiarized, article by Wikipedia, but by another man of the same name, then of more interest and pertinence in the context of our discussion would not be what would happen (to endless pages of biographical criticism, or to truckloads of new grist for English doctoral mills, or to sad Stratford, or to inspired if unplagiarized Wikipedia articles) but what would not happen: crucially, there would be no change in the fact that the plays are full of plagiarized ideas, arguments, words, phrases and sentences, nor in the fact that the plays have in turn been plagiarized throughout the subsequent history of literature to such an extent that Shakespeare's phrases have now become part of the reservoir of everyday unattributed, if not plagiarized, cliches. It was surely wrong of me to stress that plagiarism can rise even to the level of a genre such as the Cento, when typically it is just the quotidian business of literary writers brazenly to steal (should I acknowledge here also that this claim might be taken to evoke Steve Jobs' invocation of Picasso's likely-borrowed idea that great artists brazenly steal from others all the time and that this is one of their defining traits?). And if I could muster, for the sake of decorum as much as argument, the ability to take the whole question seriously for a second, I would still be forced to say that Houellebecq's plagiarism is traditional not anomalous, and its identification as a species of theft would be downright banal even if trivially true, which fact M. Glad, though responsible in the first place for raising the whole business to the status of an "affair," has the good sense at least implicitly to acknowledge. I would probably want to add, maintaining this unlikely seriousness, that literary plagiarism has great literary value, that Shakespeare is better for having stolen from Montaigne, and that Montaigne's ideas are themselves enlivened, even improved, when uttered by Shakespearean characters whose motivations are more clear, and whose claims are subject to refutation by the deeds or words of other characters."I wake and feel the fell of night, not day," to take another example that would appear arbitrary only to those who don't know what I was up to last night, is a line with altogether different meanings and effects in Ashbery's cento "The Dong with the Luminous Nose" from its meanings and effects in the Hopkins poem from which it is lifted. Now H. plagiarizes Wikipedia, and if I were a better person, more worthy of mouthing moralizing pieties, more self-righteously sure of my own unadulterated originality at every juncture, more appreciative at least of the less than (as you point out) anonymous horde's unacknowledged (doubtless original and impeccably documented, inspired if not plagiarized) explication of the fly's reproductive activities, and if I agree at the same time that H. is no Borges, just as Ashbery fails to breathe the rare and lofty poetic air where Hopkins dwells, I still wouldn't give much of a fly's arse. All of which, I hope, can be taken as grounds for forgiving the lack of energy and honor I bring to the task of defending an obvious if throwaway and in good part irrelevant claim that Wikipedia is full of plagiarism (I was silent on whether it infringes copyright). But presumably no defense or citation is needed for the weaker claim that the possibility of plagiarism, like the possibility of vandalism, is a condition of the possibility of Wikipedia, and is the obvious reason for what I am sure is its perpetual and heroic vigilance, of which you cite an admirable instance. I still don't know what exactly to infer from that 10k-page expurgation you mention, but here's an apparently meaningful quotation from the discussion to which you were kind enough to link: "As near as we can tell, everything this person [Darius] has written that is longer than a few sentences is a copyvio. This means that the well of articles he has created -- barring the ones that are simple lists of data -- are, quite simply, poisoned foundations upon which we're letting others build." On this evidence, it seems this was less a case of purging pages "just to be sure," as you say, that there were no copyright violations, than a case of purging because it looked like an egregious case. Your personal reasons for thinking this was all merely precautionary and therefore, apparently, if I read you correctly, evidence of a Wikipedia unsoiled by silently borrowed thoughts, rather than a case of dealing with an extreme example of a possibly pervasive problem, would be of some interest to me--though I say that despite the fact that in general questions of whether Wikipedia plagiarizes (seriously, is that a question? do we need to look for examples?), or whether it is plagiarized, when measured against its undeniable and immeasurable value are as trivial (to me) as the infidelities of a person such as Woods when measured against his immeasurable talent. Finally, I cannot restrain my imagination from wandering down the path that leads to the fantasy of Mr. Woods frantically trying to shred ten thousand incriminating documents, so in the case of our reaching the end of that improbable path, can I rely on your being back in the market for my specious analogies, of which I have a practically inexhaustible supply in dire need of peddling? tl;dr? Leave out the adjectives and adverbs