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.)

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.

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.

Um, Brad, you employ one. Sure, it's not strictly a Chicago story, but the hits would be nice.

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.

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?

College Humor, Cracked, JPGMag. It's all about the incentives. The Citizen's just not there yet. The big shift from blogging to aggregation around new year's was in part prompted by me sending 3 writers to Grant Park on election night and having none of them send back stories "because it was crowded." As they were "citizen journalists" I had no leverage or way to hold them accountable. In retrospect this seems obvious, but it was a wakeup call. Can't run a business on volunteer writing, gotta get some central thing running consistently and without fail, i.e. the aggregator.

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.

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

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.

Screw 28, if you're a high school senior you'd miss graduation for something like this.

"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. :)

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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...

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".

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.

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".)

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.

No, there's another option: Fair use.

If you create a book compilation of "Wikipedia's greatest hits", then you're stuck releasing the book as ShareAlike or negotiating with the copyright holder(s).

If you write a book about a particular topic and you use excerpts, quotes, or ideas from Wikipedia (and properly cite them), that's fair use. I'm sure there's some sort of ceiling on that (IANAL) which prevents you from copy+paste-ing broad swaths of text into your work and "citing" it.

The key is the citation, which is where the author screwed up. If you're using text/ideas from a particular source and not citing that source, then you're not covered under fair use and are obliged to follow whatever licensing system the original author wishes.

I'm surprised (and confused) -- can you really include a great number of large, verbatim or nearly verbatim blocks of text from Wikipedia, cite them, and not be called out for plagiarism?

What's to stop any author from saving themselves hours/weeks/years of effort by simply by copying text and sticking a citation at the end of the paragraph, as it appears was done in this case?

Reuse can never be 'plagiarism' if you cite your source and present it as a quote. Plagiarism is only presenting someone else's work as if it were your own.

Now, if the book is 99% other people's work, but all copying is cited, you might still run afoul of copyright laws for copying without permission. But it won't be plagiarism. Whether 'fair use' applies depends on a test where many factors are weighed. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Very roughly, the idea is: does your use add value for society without damaging the value of the original work? Using less is better than using more. Using for educational/nonprofit uses is better than trying to make a quick buck. Trying to make a buck in a new transformative way is better than trying to make a buck at the expense of (by replacing) the original work in the marketplace. Using just enough to have a conversation about the work, adding your commentary, is better than just reusing the juicy parts to save yourself effort. Etc.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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