Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired has a new book coming out on July 7th called Free: The Future of a Radical Price. With a fascinating glimpse into Anderson’s copy-and-paste-without-attribution writing technique, Waldo Jaquith writes in The Virginia Quarterly Review [online]:
In the course of reading Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion, $26.99), for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources.
Jaquith then offers a comparison between text taken from Wikipedia and the final print version of Anderson’s book:
[Jaquith's complete article including extended examples of Anderson plagiarizing]
Anderson took a last-minute 5th grade approach to writing. He found the Wikipedia listing for “Usury” and pasted the text into his manuscript. His reply to Jaquith’s accusation is flaccid at best:
All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources…
This all came about once we collapsed the notes into the copy. 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 three groups:
- Long passages of direct quotes (indent, with source)
- Intellectual debts, phrases and other credit due (author credited inline, as with Michael Pollan)
- In the case of source material without an individual author to credit (as in the case of Wikipedia), do a write-through.
Obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad. As you’ll note, these are mostly on the margins of the book’s focus, mostly on historical asides, but that’s no excuse. I should have had a better process to make sure the write-through covered all the text that was not directly sourced. 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. [quoted text of email from Chris Anderson in reply to Waldo Jaquith]
Anderson ignored a basic rule of research: Always start with Wikipedia. Never conclude with it.
5 Steps From Wikipedia To A Reliable Source
Here’s a quick play-by-play of how Anderson should have gone about finding and citing his source on usury:
Step 1: Find the citation link for the portion of the Wikipedia article you’d like to quote. (Don’t quote it. Not even if you’re a famous editor and you’re really busy.)
A. Click on citation link in the Wikipedia article:
B. Identify the key portions of the citation. In this case, author last name and date of publication.
Step 2: After finding the citation, launch a web search including the author name and original search term. Many bloggers would stop at the citation of Moehlman and use a “^Moehlman, 1934, page 7” attribution. As a professional editor conducting research for a print publication, I’m holding Anderson to a higher standard. Note: pasting from Wikipedia is a bad idea because you’re trusting a stranger’s transcription. Don’t be lazy.
Step 3: Unsurprisingly, Google returns another Wikipedia result. A quick glance reveals a dramatic increase in useful information. Add the author’s full name, book title and document information to the query. (It’s not always this easy, but it’s not too much to ask for a bit of effort from an educated “journalist.”)
Step 4: Clicking through the Cambridge Journals Online result renders a listing of the original text cited in the Wikipedia article. I’d hope whatever remains of Anderson’s sense of journalistic integrity would drive him to order a copy of the text and cite the original source. (It’s obviously too late for that as he’s chosen the route of excuses instead of admission and reparation.)
Step 5: Order a copy of “The Christianization of Interest” and cite it as one would any other print publication.
It’s a pretty simple process. For some reason, Anderson couldn’t be bothered with it.
The publisher of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Hyperion, offered this statement in support of Anderson:
We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson’s response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book. [quoted text of email from Hyperion to Waldo Jaquith]
Essentially, the Kindle version will include hyperlinks to the original Wikipedia articles. The print version will continue to put forth crowd-sourced web copy as Anderson’s original thought.
I see a failure by Anderson to conduct quality research and insist on proper citation of resources. I see a failure by Hyperion to recognize a breakdown in the integrity of a book’s content and act in a way that encourages trust in the publication system.
What do you see?
Share this post on Twitter
————————-
Thanks to Ed Shahzade for pointing me to this topic. Find him on Twitter.
Further reading:
WiReD editor ‘fesses to churnalism – The Register
‘Free’ plagiarism charge frames Internet content debate - LA Times
“Corrections in the digital edition of Free” – Chris Anderson Blog (Rehash of email to Jaquith)
June 25th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
good looking out.
June 25th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Lazy is right! I hope I'm never tempted to do the same.
June 25th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Being tempted is fine. Following through on the temptation and publishing content as your own when it isn't…not so much.
The fact that Anderson waited to be called out before saying something…says a bit. He has a blog, he could easily have posted about his situation with wiki citations. As far as I can tell, that didn't happen.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
I think you've forgotten one element here. I've also written many articles and books. You might find passages in Wikipedia that are word for word the same as certain passages in my article/book. However, the reason is because I also wrote the passage in Wikipedia on that topic.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
That's an entirely different situation though! When you write something on Wikipedia, you are listed as a contributor.
Anderson's book isn't out yet. He didn't write the Wikipedia articles and makes no claim to such in any of his remarks on the situation.
You bring up an interesting point though. I wonder how many authors get emails accusing them of plagiarism after an unknowing reader stumbles across something in a wiki and doesn't realize the authors are the same? Quite annoying to deal with, I'd think! =)
Unfortunately, Anderson's situation is not one of writing too much but of writing too little and neglecting to give credit where it was due.
June 25th, 2009 at 7:58 pm
The 1st required class in my Masters program was Research and Composition. I was bored to tears and asked the Director why we had to take such a remedial class. He said I would be surprised at how many students were able to make it through high school, make it through college, get accepted into grad school and still not know how to properly research and cite.
Looks like some are even able to make it to the level of published author…*sighs*
June 25th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Yes. He's a big proponent of using Wikipedia as an authoritative source, too.
Now we see where that ended.
=(
June 26th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Can't you just click on the cited references at the end of the entry? I have found this to be useful in finding other references.
June 26th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
This may be the most useful thing I've read on the web in a month. I'm very troubled about Wikipedia. I use it, but I also despise the anonymity of the editing process. Thank you for giving me a simple way to think about putting it in perspective.
–James Marcus Bach
Author: Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar (a book about self-education)
June 26th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
That's only available for a certain percentage of cited references. The majority, from what I've seen, are quick dead-ends and need further effort to dig up original content.
If you want your work to be taken seriously, you need to take it seriously yourself.
Cut-and-paste from wikipedia into a published work…just doesn't cut it.
June 26th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Neglecting to give credit is much more common than it used to be. Sometimes accidental when compiling research or story notes in a haphazard way: bits of paper clipped to a daytime or computer post-it notes around the desktop, etc.
But sloppy citation practices and the increasing attempts to pass off someone else's writing as your own are rampant on the Internet. Most print publications have some type of peer review or editorial fact-checkers to help keep things honest. But from what I can tell in the newspaper game, fact checkers have been jettisoned and journalists have been replaced by reporters. Integrity seems to have been replaced by speed.
June 26th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
The editing process isn't so very anonymous. Every change is saved and linked to. Not so obvious to the casual observer, but Wikipedia does a great job of leaving trails.
There has yet to be a mass awakening of brilliant thinkers producing wholly original content and posting it solely online. Until that day comes, if it ever does, it's best to look for a citation that lists an opium addict from 1895. =)
June 26th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Increased frequency of a behavior still isn't much of an excuse, is it?
June 26th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
It may not be so very anonymous, but it is anonymous in the most crucial way, to me: I probably don't know who (what real person with a real name and reputation) I'm dealing with when I edit an article, and there is little in the way of effective community sanctions for bad behavior (because bad people can shed their identities at will). I have no idea what the editors backgrounds are, or their rhetorical/epistemic/ontological perspectives. That's not supposed to matter, because it's all supposed to be “objective”, but of course it does matter– as anyone knows who has been through a dispute over the “truth” can attest.
Because I don't like to collaborate with people who choose to wear masks, and there are others like me, Wikipedia ends up being a project created by people who “aren't like me.” Time will tell, but I suspect that introduces a subtle yet important distortion into things when one sort of personality dominates editorship.
It's well enough to think about encyclopedias in terms of facts disputed by no one. But a lot of things in encyclopedias *are* controversial, so this issue does matter.
June 27th, 2009 at 9:04 am
You make a brilliant argument for avoiding use of Wikipedia text from the get-go.
Now that Anderson has included sections of wikipedia in the print edition of his book without citing sources, does that mean his entire book stands simply as an edit to those wiki pages and is therefore subject to the same creative commons licensing?
The issue does matter. You're right.
June 30th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
When I wrote my self-published book (which I'll be releasing late this year), I used Wikipedia in much the same way that Mr. Simonds suggested — I started there, then went through the citations to find a more reliable source, either from a book, the legitimate media or someone who was an expert or experienced in the field in question.
But I did do one additional thing. While I didn't cite Wikipedia as a source in any of my footnotes. But because some of my sources were obtained through Wikipedia, I used my bibliography to credit Wikipedia as the access point for some of my sources.
Mr. Simonds is right. You can use Wikipedia. You just can't stop there.
July 6th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
I'm going to write an ebook about “free” stuff and copy a whole bunch of Anderson's book. And not cite it. Until I'm called out on it.
Can I use Anderson's excuse that “oops, I was essentially lazy” and everything will be okay?
July 8th, 2009 at 12:03 am
I think that should work fine. =)
July 8th, 2009 at 12:04 am
You went above and beyond the call of duty in citing wikipedia as your entry point for source discovery, I think. Kudos to you!
August 30th, 2009 at 8:48 am
What’s most discouraging to me is that Anderson *still* doesn’t fully comprehend what plagiarism is.
Anderson admits openly that he meant to rewrite the passages from Wikipedia (as he put it, “do a write-through”). Clearly he’s oblivious to the fact that rewording or paraphrasing ideas taken from other sources without citation is, uh, still plagiarism.
Daniel
Quick Writing Tips Blog