Chris Anderson (Wired Editor) explains plagiarism charges | Hacker News Reader

Chris Anderson (Wired Editor) explains plagiarism charges

longtail.com

19 pointsaj11 comments

It's easy to admit guilt when caught red-handed, so I don't give him any credit for that.

He copy-pasted from wikipedia, utterly indefensible. He didn't copy a quote from wikipedia, but entire paragraphs. Even WITH attribution that's totally unacceptable. What he calls "rewriting" is exactly the same thing kids do in highschool when cheating during exams, and when copying each other's papers. The teacher isn't fooled by this transparent cheating. And neither am I.

You didn't find his explanation at all plausible, that the sections that were copied were attributed and fomatted to indicate as much, before a last-minute reformat? Why?

This is a good response, accepting his fault and explaining the reason. Transparency is a good thing, and after making a mistake apologizing too. Chapeau Chris.

5 exculpatory grafs. 3 grafs that contain actual apologies, each of which is buried in a mitigating construction (of the "I did this in good faith, but that's no excuse" variety).

What would Timothy Noah think?

http://www.slate.com/?id=2061056

I really like his response. He took complete responsibility for the error and gave a very reasonable explanation for how they got there in the first place. In doing this, he came across as a very honest and straightforward kind of guy.

I wasn't interested in this book before but I'm going to buy it now after reading so much about it. Its almost like a brilliant PR move. Perhaps there is some truth to "There's no such thing as bad publicity"

Perhaps, but I'd like to know how common this 'write-through' technique is. That's basically taking text directly from some source and rewriting it to make it your own words. That doesn't feel like the same thing as writing.

If I'd known that was acceptable it would have made writing The Geek Atlas a lot quicker!

It is extremely common in various MFA(Made For Adsense) type pages, rather it is the end result when page owners hire low priced writers and thus the result. Then again, MFA creators are unlikely to pay for high quality writers.

Needless to say, value of something like this is very, very questionable.

I'm not much of a writer, so I'm curious:

All of the copied passages were concise descriptions of historical events. Obviously, quoting verbatim (like was done here) is plagiarism, but given that he wasn't there to witness the events, isn't the only option to take other accounts and rewrite them in his own words?

Rewriting would be something closer to:

The passages he copied were short descriptions of events in history. Repeating them word-for-word, like he did, would be considered plagiarism, but since they are a source for events he wasn't there to see, shouldn't he just reword them?

There's no point in doing that. It's better to quote verbatim with citations, and to write when there's something new to say. Historians can compile primary sources into a new document that adds something to the existing information; they don't curate documents, they narrate events.

There's no allowance for style? If my source is dry and pedantic, and quoting would disrupt the flow of what I'm trying to say, it's really that grievous a sin to rewrite?

Standup response.

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