print
One of the very first things high school students learn nowadays is that Wikipedia should never, ever be considered a legitimate source for research. Maybe Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson was in high school before Wikipedia was a big thing, but at some point down the line, he should have gotten the speech about how plagiarism is wrong. If he did, according to some recent reports, it seems like it maybe didn't stick. Or, maybe he just got really caught up in the topic he was writing on. In his forthcoming book, Free: The Future of Radical Price, about the business benefits of free things, Anderson allegedly lifted several passages from Wikipedia and two other published sources.
After Virginia Quarterly Review writer Waldo Jaquith got a little highlighter-happy and pointed out large chunks of the book that didn't properly attribute sources, Anderson released an apology, citing production troubles as the cause of the oversight.
"I had the original sources footnoted, but once we lost the footnotes at
the 11th hour, I went through the document and redid all the
attributions ... In the case of source material without an individual author to credit (as in the case of Wikipedia), [I did] a write-through," he wrote. "Obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad. ... I think what we’ll do is publish those notes after all, online as they
should have been to begin with. That way the links are live and we
don’t have to wrestle with how to freeze them in time, which is what
threw me in the first place."
Hyperion, the publishing company behind Free, supports Anderson's explanation and promises the electronic and future versions of the book will be corrected.
Related Links:
List of the Day: 10 Writers to Follow on Twitter
The Virginia Quarterly Review: Chris Anderson's Free Contains Apparent Plagiarism
Wired.com
Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.
The Oprah Winfrey Show to End in…
Roland Emmerich Unveils Independence Day Sequels
What Will James Franco's General Hospital Experiment,…
Pixies Play Fallon, Fans Pick Second Song…
Top 10 Best Debut Novels of the…
The 17 Best Romantic Comedies This Decade
The 50 Best Movies of the Decade…
The 25 Best Movie Performances of the…
Frightened Rabbit - Good Arms Vs. Bad…
Blind Pilot - The Story I Heard
B.O.B. - Put Me On
Punch Brothers - Punch Brothers at CMJ
When comparing the Wikipedia entry and the excerpt from Anderson's book, it's clear that both are referencing the same 1872 New York Times article.
Several of the highlights passages are direct quotes from the article. Each article even prefaces the quote, stating that it is from the article.
Multiple sources quoting the same article - and attributing it - is not plagiarism. There is no way to tell from this excerpt that Anderson didn't get his information directly from the article that he attributed.
While the original Waldo Jaquith article in the Virginia Quarterly Review does lay out a strong case, this Paste article has failed to capture any of that (including that the article above was actually printed in 1875, not 1872 like both Wikipedia and Anderson state).
Including this information in the related links field is not enough. Please try to include an actual example of the supposed plagiarism when writing an article about said plagiarism.
Readers, to get the actual information on this story, please read the full Jaquith article here: http://www.vqronline.org/blog/2009/06/23/chris-anderson-free/. (Also in related links.)