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The new book from Wired editor and bestselling author Chris Anderson contains multiple passages lifted from Wikipedia. The examples of plagiarism were discovered by a reviewer for the Virginia Quarterly Review and Anderson admits that he failed to properly attribute the text. Here’s how he explained himself:
As some of you may have seen, VQR rightly spotted that I failed to cite Wikipedia in some passages in Free. This is entirely my own screwup, and will be corrected in the ebook and digital forms before publication (and in the notes, which will be posted online at the same time the hardcover is released), but I did want to explain a bit more how it happened and what we’re doing about it…
In my drafts, I had intended to blockquote Wikipedia passages, footnoting their URL. But my publisher, like many others, was uncomfortable with the changing nature of Wikipedia, and wanted me to timestamp each URL (something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Anderson page viewed on July 8th, 2008), which struck me as clumsy and archaic. So at the 11th hour we decided to kill the notes and footnotes entirely and I integrated the attributions into the copy.
In doing so, 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…
Edward Champion has weighed in and suggests that Anderson’s transgressions extend beyond what was discovered by VQR. But others, including Anderson’s publisher, have accepted his explanation.
FishbowlNY managed to track down Waldo Jaquith, the VQR reviewer, and get him to explain how he discovered the Wikipedia passages:
For Jaquith, it all started with a parenthetical. During the passage from "Free" in which Anderson describes the saying "There’s no such thing as a free lunch," Jaquith noticed that something was amiss. "It mentioned Crescent City and then, parenthetically, said New Orleans," he said. "At first, I was thrown off. I thought that maybe that before it was called New Orleans it was called Crescent City and I was mad at myself for not knowing that."
The reference needled at Jaquith so he did some research. His first stop: Wikipedia. To his surprise, the Wikipedia entry for New Orleans only mentioned Crescent City as a nickname. So he Googled the citation just as Anderson had written it in his book. That’s how he found an entry for explaining free lunch on Wikipedia.
