6 ms·

Chris Anderson's Free Contains Apparent Plagiarism

55 points by razorburn 17y ago

tokenadult 17y ago
The sidebar displays of textual comparisons in the submitted article are very interesting, as is the attribution of the Wikipedia entries.
gruseom 17y 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 17y ago
  Sorry, but if you're trained as a journalist, it is.
  - sachinag 17y 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 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.
    - furyg3 17y ago
      Screw 28, if you're a high school senior you'd miss graduation for something like this.
  - gruseom 17y 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. :)
    - brandnewlow 17y ago
      I always find this idea interesting, that newspapers economic woes have something to do with journalists getting worse at reporting the news. When were "they" markedly better? Aren't the executives more to blame here?
      - gruseom 17y ago
        I'm not sure they were better. They might have deserved it for a long time. :) The MSM does seem to be getting worse to me, but this might be an optical illusion - an effect of the contrast with how much better its emerging replacement is.
        brandnewlow 17y ago
        See, that's a valid view. People are welcome to think they're all getting what they deserve. I just don't think it makes sense to connect the quality or perceived lack of quality of today's mainstream journalism to the financial straights of the big media companies.
  - Alex3917 17y ago
    As someone who isn't a trained journalist, who cares? It's not like it makes the book any less good.
- newsio 17y 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.
  - brandnewlow 17y 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.
    - sachinag 17y ago
      Um, Brad, you employ one. Sure, it's not strictly a Chicago story, but the hits would be nice.
      - brandnewlow 17y ago
        No Chicago angle. My tech guys have been a bit elusive as of late. The whole Citizen journalism thing's a bit of a crock. :) Besides, we're gearing up to blow the Taste of Chicago out of the water this weekend.
        sachinag 17y ago
        You won't get free boot-stomping journalism, but you can get free analysis (see DeLong, Yglesias, Instapundit, Duncan Black, McArdle, Archpundit, I could go on). Example: there's someone out there who can explain why Daley flopped on the Olympic guarantee - did he want to? Pretty clearly no. Did he have to? Pretty clearly yes. But, instead, we get more of the same "oh, that Daley, he shits on the city". The issue is - will people work for free for someone else? As far as I can tell, the only community doing that online is at DailyKos. Am I wrong?
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
sfphotoarts 17y ago
someone should do an LCS on the electronic version and submit the results to Wired :)
pchristensen 17y ago
Caught another plagiarist a few days ago here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661875 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 17y 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.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  Why do you think that would be against Google's ToS? I wouldn't guess so.
pj 17y 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_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Comm...
- gojomo 17y 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".
  - pj 17y 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.
    - gojomo 17y ago
      No. Only if he says, "I license my work under copyleft/ShareAlike", is it under ShareAlike. Anderson's response is quoted at the end of the article. Roughly he says: "Whoops, we copied it by mistake, it should have been quoted or rewritten. We'll correct online and in future printings." It doesn't in any way change his copyright/license. (He may very well offer the book for free, given his schtick, but there's no automatic compulsion to. And if you copied his work without permission, you couldn't argue "but he did the same thing" or "he accidentally gave me permission".)
  - 17y ago
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
devin 17y ago
No one takes into account that it may have been his publisher's wish to not include wikipedia citations.
- jon_dahl 17y ago
  That could be, but it would still be a violation of Wikipedia's licensing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Comm...
Tichy 17y 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 17y 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.
- tokenadult 17y 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 17y 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=492376

55 points by razorburn 17y ago

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

gruseom 17y 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 17y ago
Sorry, but if you're trained as a journalist, it is.
- sachinag 17y 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 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.
  - furyg3 17y ago
    Screw 28, if you're a high school senior you'd miss graduation for something like this.
- gruseom 17y 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. :)
  - brandnewlow 17y ago
    I always find this idea interesting, that newspapers economic woes have something to do with journalists getting worse at reporting the news. When were "they" markedly better? Aren't the executives more to blame here?
    - gruseom 17y ago
      I'm not sure they were better. They might have deserved it for a long time. :) The MSM does seem to be getting worse to me, but this might be an optical illusion - an effect of the contrast with how much better its emerging replacement is.
      - brandnewlow 17y ago
        See, that's a valid view. People are welcome to think they're all getting what they deserve. I just don't think it makes sense to connect the quality or perceived lack of quality of today's mainstream journalism to the financial straights of the big media companies.
- Alex3917 17y ago
  As someone who isn't a trained journalist, who cares? It's not like it makes the book any less good.
newsio 17y 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.
- brandnewlow 17y 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.
  - sachinag 17y ago
    Um, Brad, you employ one. Sure, it's not strictly a Chicago story, but the hits would be nice.
    - brandnewlow 17y ago
      No Chicago angle. My tech guys have been a bit elusive as of late. The whole Citizen journalism thing's a bit of a crock. :) Besides, we're gearing up to blow the Taste of Chicago out of the water this weekend.
      - sachinag 17y ago
        You won't get free boot-stomping journalism, but you can get free analysis (see DeLong, Yglesias, Instapundit, Duncan Black, McArdle, Archpundit, I could go on). Example: there's someone out there who can explain why Daley flopped on the Olympic guarantee - did he want to? Pretty clearly no. Did he have to? Pretty clearly yes. But, instead, we get more of the same "oh, that Daley, he shits on the city". The issue is - will people work for free for someone else? As far as I can tell, the only community doing that online is at DailyKos. Am I wrong?
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

sfphotoarts 17y ago

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

pchristensen 17y ago

Caught another plagiarist a few days ago here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661875 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 17y 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.
tokenadult 17y ago
Why do you think that would be against Google's ToS? I wouldn't guess so.

pj 17y 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_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Comm...

gojomo 17y 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".
- pj 17y 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.
  - gojomo 17y ago
    No. Only if he says, "I license my work under copyleft/ShareAlike", is it under ShareAlike. Anderson's response is quoted at the end of the article. Roughly he says: "Whoops, we copied it by mistake, it should have been quoted or rewritten. We'll correct online and in future printings." It doesn't in any way change his copyright/license. (He may very well offer the book for free, given his schtick, but there's no automatic compulsion to. And if you copied his work without permission, you couldn't argue "but he did the same thing" or "he accidentally gave me permission".)
- 17y ago

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

devin 17y ago

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

jon_dahl 17y ago
That could be, but it would still be a violation of Wikipedia's licensing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Comm...

Tichy 17y 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 17y 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.

tokenadult 17y 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 17y 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=492376