A plagiarism scandal is unfolding in the crossword puzzle world
fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com
The most interesting thing about this to me is that it belies the common impression that many have that the NYT crossword is "elitist". I mean, how can it be "elitist" if it's routinely copied by USA Today??
I think people try it, find it to be impossible to penetrate on the first try, see a couple of clues about 1930's opera or NYC-specific stuff and then punt. However, like many other things in life, there is a learning curve to basic competency. There is a common, shared vocabulary among professional crossword constructors that provides a foundation for even the most difficult puzzles. The point is that you can still finish the puzzle even without knowing anything about 1930's opera by knowing something else nearby and some intelligent guesses.
Among most solvers, the quality of a puzzle is proportional to how fun it is to solve and that is closely related to non-repetition of the theme. Good puzzles minimize this and solvers take it for granted that every puzzle will be genuinely new. The best case is a theme that is never before seen, something completely original.
The problem with plagiarism in this case is easier to understand if it's seen through the lens of an inveterate solver. It's a betrayal of this unspoken (but still very casual) ethic of originality.
See almost any post from: http://rexwordpuzzle.blogspot.com/ for an example of typical daily thoughts along these lines.
If that's the case, I imagine it's partly due to it not being widely known that the difficulty of the puzzles follows a set schedule[1]. People pick up a Saturday puzzle, very reasonably suppose that future puzzles will be similar, and write off the whole business.
[1] Easiest on Monday, ramping up to hardest on Saturday, with Sunday somewhere in the middle, for anyone else unaware.
(Also, the obscure 1930's opera references have been on the decline since Will Shortz took over for the late Eugene T. Maleska. Maleska was an admitted elitist who filled the puzzles with high culture, while Shortz prefers misleading wordplay. You see a 5-letter clue, "Pentagonal part of a diamond", and it takes a while for the baseball reference to click - but once it does, PLATE is the obvious answer.)
I've looked at the USA Today crossword a few times, but found the quality relatively poor. Lots of dull clues and obscure three-letter words to make the fill fit together. No wonder he got away with plagiarism for so long, the people who'd notice wouldn't bother sticking around long enough to find anything wrong.
In particular, I wonder to what degree this sort of plagiarism causes any real harm, repeating others clever ideas from years ago in a way that can only be discovered by data mining. Are the puzzles less fun knowing they have shared elements with ones from years ago?
I remember in middle/high school writing research papers for English class. I spent more time trying to NOT plagiarize than I spent on any other aspect of the paper. Which doubly absurd when you consider that there is literally not a single original thought a 14 year old is capable of having with respect to the War of 1812. When the entirety of my knowledge on a subject is based on a half dozen sources how the hell can I not plagiarize.
In that instance I say plagiarize away! Focus on idea sharing. On how to explain complex ideas to your classmates. On how to build consistent abstractions or arguments. On literally anything other than how to rewrite the three sentences so it says the same thing as those three sentences but with different words so you don't get kicked out of school.
> Focus on idea sharing. On how to explain complex ideas to your classmates. On how to build consistent abstractions or arguments.
100% agreed! And I think most cogent interpretations of plagiarism would say that if you're able to do those things then you're not plagiarising, you're building off of other sources (providing that you cite them correctly).
(It's entirely possible that I've been lucky, and that my teachers/professors took unusually rational stances when it came to this kind of thing. But it feels like you're presenting a false dichotomy.)
There is a very clear line between simply copy pasting an idea and reformulating that idea in your own words.
I agree that we should focus more on coming up with ideas independently, and that if they so happen to coincide with an idea someone came up before, no big deal.
In today's diverse world, however, what are the chances that you were even remotely going to say something word for word how someone else before you said it?
A) It isn't your original thought or original words
B) They can look up some certain work by the person if they're interested in more
There's no doubt some level of it that's just academic elitism (don't even get me started on "authoritative sources"), but not deceiving your reader is a good portion of the requirement. It's not just about the fact that you used someone else's words, it's the fact that you did so, and passed off that work as your own.
It's bizarre and irrational. It's not just academic elitism, it's also about how the notion of copyright has changed our natural creative and communication processes. The natural copying, sharing and evolution of ideas has gone from being a natural of expression and communication into something verboten. Our collective culture, our modern folk tales and songs, are controlled in perpetuity with zero tolerance for "plagiarism". Any derivative ideas may not be retransmitted, reproduced, rebroadcast, or otherwise distributed without the express written consent of the copyright holder.
It's unlikely that my new piece will be cohesive, because source A's quotes use the London school while source B uses the classic school, which use the same terms albeit with different nuances. I might not even realize there is a difference.
While if I quote them, it's possible for a reader to figure out patterns I hadn't noticed in my sources. The citations also act as a normalization (in the relational sense) for how the different ideas are connected. With "Steve Freeman writes '...'" then a reader knows that I'm talking about London school, even if I don't know that.
As an example, look at all of the study of the Bible in order to identify anonymous changes in authorship. The fact that such details can be teased out of the text shows that textual analysis does provide useful information. (Stylometric analysis, which identified Joe Klein as the author of 'Primary Colors', also shows that there is extra information in the text than just the words.) Quotes help reduce the cognitive load for future readers by making these cognitive shifts more clear.
Perhaps the most extreme example of this is Borges' short story 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote', which "is often used to raise questions and discussion about the nature of authorship, appropriation and interpretation." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...
> Any derivative ideas may not be retransmitted, reproduced, rebroadcast
You are exaggerating. For example, there are any number of derivative work of Tolkien, including parodies like National Lampoon's "Bored of the Rings", or Pat Murphy's rewrite of "The Hobbit" as the space opera "There and Back Again".
These neither infringe upon copyright nor are generally considered plagiarism.
Copyright infringement and plagiarism overlap in how they are created, but they are not the same.
If I quote pages of text, with citation but without permission and beyond the limits of fair use, then that is copyright infringement but not plagiarism.
If I pass off an out-of-copyright 19th century play as my own, then a playwright would call that plagiarism, even though there is no copyright infringement.
Plagiarism is not about the copying in and of itself. It's about appropriating somebody else's work and pretending it's yours.
How do you feel when someone claims your ideas as their own?
My blog has around a million views lifetime. I've no idea if anyone has claimed any ideas as their own. Maybe? Thus far it's not hurt me.
I've taken tons of ideas from Stack Overflow. All programmers have. How often do we include citations back? Sometimes! If the code is clever and non-obvious. But generally speaking there's nothing. How did I know to use this bit of API goodness? No one knows! It's a mystery!
While I generally agree with this sentence. It is fairly obvious that he wasn't "building on it and sharing it." It seems he was changing a few words then putting his name on it and profiting by selling the intellectual property (that he doesn't own).
I don't really have a huge problem with that, even if he's selling it. Yes, it's plagiarism, yes, it's copying, yes, it's considered "intellectual property theft". No, I don't see why it should be considered such a big deal, nor do I think every crossword benefits from being created entirely from scratch at additional effort.
If someone comes up with a great clue theme and someone notices a few years later and reuses it for others to enjoy, why should I get angry about plagiarism rather that feel happy that a great idea has been shared?
That isn't the "core contention"
>More broadly, 1,090 Universal puzzles and 447 USA Today puzzles were at least a 75 percent match to an earlier puzzle in the database. (Sometimes the match is with a puzzle from the same publication.)
and though it may have been "self-plagiarizing" legally. Ethically, I have to wonder whether Parker was getting paid for the "original" crosswords that were submitted or if he was only using pseudonyms to falsely illustrate that the crosswords were original works.
But to wholesale copy 90% or 95% of someone's creation, as in some of the examples in the article, crosses a line. Imagine someone wholesale copying the famous opening guitar riff from Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven -- there would be outrage from the fans, and undoubtedly a lawsuit would follow.
I think the only reason this fellow Parker has gotten away with it for so long is that he's in a more obscure field where it's a lot less obvious to uncover plagiarism without an intentional check, as someone has finally done.
“We don’t look at anybody else’s puzzles or really care about anyone else’s puzzles,” Parker said.
I don't believe that for one second. Someone in the profession for all these years, and he never looks at NYT puzzles?
Led Zeppelin Loses First Round of Plagarism Lawsuit: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/led-zeppelin-loses-first-round-i...
In some circumstances, readers need to be able to evaluate an author's work for originality or contribution to the state of the art. If paraphrased or word-for-word ideas aren't quoted, the reader doesn't know if the line of argument is 1% new or 100% new.
Plagiarism—in a context where someone's work is being evaluated (generally, in academia or non-fiction publishing)—is a deliberate confusion of who contributed what to the argument being made. Which matters for evaluation of rationally presented ideas, to understand where arguments are coming from so criticism of those ideas can be located more easily.
If the thesis is taken from someone else, that's a gross abuse of academic standards. If you want to defend someone else's thesis on different grounds than they defended it, you can do so, but it should be made explicit that that's what you're doing, which entails citing the source of the thesis in some explicit way.
Furthermore, by citing sources, if a reader appreciates one line of thought but not what's built around it, they can go to that other source or author and start down a different path. Failing to cite sources makes that more difficult. IF it's recognized as most likely a quote, and IF the original source has high pagerank, it's easy to find. If not, you have to go consult academics in the area in question to see if they recognize it, or query the author to do what he or she should have done in the first place: cite the source.
I don't view it as theft, or anything like that. More like abuse or a waste of the reader's time and intellectual effort in trying to evaluate a complex argument without hints about the geneology of the component ideas.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/07/the-cheating-pr...
Certainly an interesting way to make money. I wonder exactly how he managed to do this.
Crossword puzzles have a certain vocabulary of words which are rare in conversational English but appear with high frequency in puzzles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crosswordese -- how many times have you used 'olio' or 'etui' in conversation?), and poor/mass-produced crosswords take this to an extreme, which in turn takes both the challenge and the fun out of the puzzle.
Also, if you do enough puzzles you will end up noticing ones which are more subtly repetitive, and again there's less fun in re-solving one you've already "done".