Wired Editor Apologizes for Copying from Wikipedia in New Book | Hacker News Reader

Wired Editor Apologizes for Copying from Wikipedia in New Book

mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com

12 pointsfirebug8 comments

Using wikipedia as such a large reference that a significant portion of a book is paraphrased and even more so that word for word contributions were found even through editing out the copied work suggests a lack of knowledge as well as laziness in the writing of his book.

Let's not pretend that 'experts' are supposed to know everything. If you went for a programming interview and were rejected because you didn't have all of the regex syntax on the tip of your tongue, would you feel the same way? I don't think it indicates a lack of knowledge or laziness. It's just an acknowledgment of the central role that Wikipedia plays in research these days combined with the ease of copy-paste functionality in word processing systems. Had the same thing happened twenty years ago with the Encyclopedia Britannica that might be a different story. But Anderson intended to rework the sections he copied and forgot to. Sloppy work, yes, but it's so easy to see how someone could make this mistake innocently.

I have no problem researching topics with wikipedia, if it is pertinent information and you can read you should be able to find a better source.

Does not compare in anyway to an interview and previous knowledge.

If I'm writing a book on a subject, I'm going to write it because I understand it well and think I have something interesting to say. I won't just pick something that I think makes money and then bullshit something into profitability.

Come to think of it, that's also how I look for the good startup companies amidst all the bad: When you find the ones run by people who understand what they're doing, you find a satisfaction in their output that you don't find elsewhere. 280North comes to mind, as does Contrast.io.

Yes, when I went to school, kids were taught in junior high to THINK and to digest what they read, and then write in their own words the overall facts about the issue they were writing about. That much verbatim copying is just sloppiness as a nonfiction writer, and inexcusable if it isn't introduced with indications of the source.

Moreover, anyone who has looked at advice on proper citation form since the mid-1990s knows that it's standard in many citation rules to include the download date (file access date) when the author saw the online source in the citation. That is precisely because online documents are particularly likely to change over time.

http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html

That's better than the Long Tail, which was just an unintentional work of fiction due to it being based on data from faulty third-party analysts. At least most of his Wikipedia info is probably accurate, and not essential to the rest of the book.

This means that all the copies of the book that have been printed so far are infringing the Wikipedia copyright. Fortunately, there's no physical-world equivalent of DMCA that allows Wikipedians to send an infringement notification to bookstores that carry it, requiring them to immediately disable access to the infringing material. But does it entitle Wikipedians (perhaps represented by the Wikimedia Foundation) to a share of Anderson's royalties as damages?

The funny thing to me is that given Anderson's message, he could reasonably have used many large, credited excerpts as an example of how great 'free' is.

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