I think it very unfair to the original set of word2vec papers to be talking about 'academic dishonesty'. This is a case of a user that has little to no experience with neural networks. There are a ton of articles describing the need for random initialization [1][2]. In fact, if one spends a few seconds thinking about it, the need is evident. Without it, the NN cannot perform symmetry breaking: If inputs are set to zero, all neurons will perform the same calculations, rendering the network useless.

[1] google: "neural networks vector initialization" [2] http://deeplearning.ai/ai-notes/initialization/