When Waldo Jaquith of The Virginia Quarterly Review discovered and published that Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, had plagiarized passages from Wikipedia in his new book, Free, it provoked a lively, and sometimes alarming, discussion of plagiarism.

Regret the Error has summarized the affair, and there are extensive comments on the matter at the online edition of The Virginia Quarterly Review.

One reader’s response at VQR: “Don’t care. Don’t care. Don’t care. This is more of the same garbage from academics discovering plagiarism and making a big stink where it isn’t due. Take a fine-tooth comb to any recent publication and start googling. I bet you find a lot more than this.” Another characterized the VQR article as a “witchhunt.”

While many students and even a fair number of journalists, as well as readers who “don’t care, don’t care, don’t care,” appear to think of the Internet in general, and Wikipedia in particular, as a storehouse of ready-made prose available for the taking, there are still old-school writers and editors and teachers who see this casual copying-and-pasting as theft or cheating. 

It is appalling to think that it may be necessary to restate to students and professional writers what constitutes plagiarism. But for the benefit of anyone who cut class that day, here is a short summary.

Sources: Readers are entitled to know where information comes from. Sometimes footnotes or endnotes are appropriate, and citation within the text can usually be accomplished without clumsiness. Plagiarism, which cheats the reader by failing to disclose sources, comes in two forms: misappropriation of ideas and misappropriation of exact language.

Ideas: Information that is generally known and widely available from multiple sources does not require attribution. You do not need to cite a source if you write that John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865. But if you write that he did so under the orders of Edwin M. Stanton, the secretary of war, you had better give the reader the source of your crackpot theory.

Language: If in recounting the laugh line in Our American Cousin — “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal — you sockdologizing old mantrap!” — that Booth used for cover, you then write: “The laughter and burst of applause almost covered the sound of a shot in the presidential box,” you had better make sure that the second sentence is also within quotation marks and attributed to David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln. 

Chris* Anderson, in apologizing for the passages in his book lifted from Wikipedia, explained that there was a problem with the publisher in arranging for appropriate citation. But citation was not the only problem. Exact language from another source should run within quotation marks or set off in a block of type as well as being sourced by an appropriate citation.

Perhaps it’s necessary to make this even more explicit:

Do not copy text from Wikipedia or any other source without indicating to the reader where it came from.

Plagiarism can be either deliberate or inadvertent. If inadvertent, it can result from carelessness — such as mixing one’s notes from sources with one’s draft — or from failure to understand what constitutes proper sourcing.

A fellow copy editor once detected verbatim, unsourced sentences from Web sites in a reporter’s copy. When questioned, the reporter said, “Yes, I got that from those sources. It’s background.” Improbable as the explanation of innocent error was — the reporter had earned a university degree, worked at another daily newspaper, and had attended an in-house seminar on how to avoid plagiarism — the management accepted it and kept the reporter on staff.

Now we have Chris** Anderson, an established editor and published writer, caught up in an embarrassment that he has described as an innocent error, for which he has apologized, and which he has pledged to correct. That is as it should be.

But he, and his publisher, should have known better. As should you.

* ** Correction July14: Chris Anderson was incorrectly referred to as "Curt Anderson" in the penultimate paragraph of this article. Thanks to Waldo for spotting this mistake. Update July 14: A commenter correctly pointed out that Waldo noted two occurrences of "Curt" in this post. Both have now been corrected.

John McIntyre, former head of the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun, is the author of You Don’t Say, a blog on language, usage and miscellaneous topics.

A reader of my column on how publications deal with corrections (“Daddy, where do corrections come from?") addressed a point that regularly bedevils editors: Should corrections identify who made the error?

The issue has been described at some length in the article “Who takes the fall for errors?” by Kathy English, the public editor of the Toronto Star. Let me summarize the two main perspectives on the issue.

Point A: The impersonal correction, favored by many publications, considers a published article to be a collaborative effort for which the publication takes full responsibility without fixing blame. A given article may go through many hands, and error can occur at any point. It is the publication’s fault if such errors are not identified and corrected.

Point B: The contrary view, which received support in comments on Ms. English’s article, is that because the reporter’s byline is on the story, the reporter should not be embarrassed by being made to appear responsible for an error committed by someone else.

I am a sturdy advocate of the impersonal correction, which I justify for the following reasons.

Item: The story is the publication’s, not the author’s. Put it this way. Should the subject of an article sue for libel, the writer expects the publication to assume responsibility for the defense. No reporter wants to hear an editor say, “I see you have a problem with your story. You had better get yourself a lawyer.”

Item: The story is in fact a collective product of the publication’s staff. Publications employ originating editors and copy editors, all of whom have the authority and responsibility to make necessary changes.

Item: Bylines are more important to reporters than to readers. (That is why an eight-line brief rewritten from a press release will appear in print with a reporter’s credit at the end.) A reader may register the name of a columnist, or a reporter whose beat impinges on that reader’s particular interests, but there is little reason to think that readers take regular notice of who wrote which story.

There is thus little or no reason to think that readers care who makes mistakes of fact or that readers would benefit from reading corrections that assign such responsibility. An article in yesterday’s edition of the Blat mistakenly located the battle of Antietam as having taken place near Hagerstown, Maryland, instead of Sharpsburg. The writer’s text was correct, but the error was introduced by an intern on the copy desk. The Blat regrets the error.

The reader cares whether the publication is reliable.

Item: A typical comment on Ms. English’s article: The problem in this case is that the reporter has his or her name clearly listed as writer. If THAT writer was NOT responsible, THAT fact should be noted. The reading public will always associate the article with the writer, no matter how many people are working in the background. It is only fair to exonerate the writer from blame in these cases.

Let’s turn this one around. Should a reporter enjoy a reputation for accuracy that is the product of the editing process rather than the reporter’s own work? I have seen text from reporters, passed along by originating editors, with errors that would make your hair stand on end. (I once saw a story sent to the copy desk in which the reporter had misspelled the name of its subject sixteen times; that all sixteen were consistently misspelled was thought to mark an improvement in the reporter’s abilities.)

Anonymous copy editors, at the publications that still bother to engage copy editors, silently correct multitudes of errors. Envision this “shirttail” at the end of an article: The writer of this article identified Ougadougou as the capital of Dahomey. It is the capital of Burkina Faso. A Blat copy editor corrected the error.

Fixing responsibility is useful in-house for evaluating the performance of writers and editors. Its utility for the reading public is questionable.

Item: The exception: When a publication must acknowledge the commission of a plagiarism or a fabrication — the product of professional misconduct rather than ordinary carelessness or haste —  the miscreant should be identified.

John McIntyre, former head of the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun, is the author of You Don’t Say, a blog on language, usage and miscellaneous topics.

By John E. McIntyre

Not everything that is wrong merits public correction.

It would be extremely unusual, for example, for a newspaper, magazine, or Web site to run a formal correction for an error in grammar or English usage, or for a typographical error, though there are exceptions, as when 24 Hours quoted a councilman as saying that the costs of a tunnel were “now being lowballed” instead of “not being lowballed.” Such lapses are dealt with, if at all, in in-house newsletters or memos, of which Philip B. Corbett’s excellent After Deadline at The New York Times website is an example.  

Formal corrections, such as those aggregated on this site, almost always focus on errors of fact: 

The wrong name for a person or organization — The New York Times has admitted to getting Procter and Gamble’s name wrong as Proctor and Gamble more than 100 times.  

Erroneous statistics — The Toronto Star published in May that 1,700 wind turbines are in operation in Europe; the number is about 74,000. Also in May, the paper estimated the cost or a new nuclear plant as $7,000 per megawatt of installed capacity, but the correct number is $7,000 per kilowatt. Distinguishing between mega and kilo, like the distinction between million and billion, is a hazard for mathematically impaired journalists. 

Bungled photo captions — The Washington Times ran a photo of the Obama children to illustrate an article about homicides of children in Chicago.

Recipes — You might not want to attempt any published recipe until, say, five days or a week past publication. The Hamilton Spectator ran a recipe for a ginger cake during Celiac Awareness Month than called for two cups of penne pasta instead of two cups of rice pasta.   

Popular culture — The Guardian’s  review of the latest Star Trek movie referred to a character as a Klingon rather than a Romulan, and the Los Angeles Times referred to the character as Captain Nemo instead of Captain Nero.

Wrong word — The New York Times quoted Rep. Anthony D. Weiner as saying, “You’ll forgive some of my constituents for wanting to get into the fetal poison and bathe in Purell.” He said “fetal position.”  

And more, such as people who are very much alive being reported as dead.  

But not even every error of fact winds up being corrected. When errors are identified, a responsible editor or small group of editors will determine whether they are significant enough to merit formal notice. How many minor errors of fact pass unnoticed is not easy to determine. But published corrections almost always follow when a reader complains of an error.

Sometimes a publication decides to run a clarification rather than a correction, in contexts in which the published statement of fact was technically accurate but lacked some nuance of wording or additional detail and therefore permitted a misreading.  

And in the free-for-all word of electronic publishing, some Web sites do not commonly publish corrections at all, instead updating the published articles with silent corrections as the day wears on. Bloggers, or at least the responsible ones, will authorize readers’ corrections through comments and will also apologize for errors in comments or subsequent posts. But the practice on the Web has not yet standardized.  

One thing that the Internet has beneficially fostered is the proliferation of apologies for plagiarisms and fabrication. The ease of theft through copying and pasting electronic texts is matched only by the ease of detection of such theft. And with bloggers and other commentators quick to jump on any publication detected in apparent jiggery-pokery — such as Maureen Dowd’s recent appropriation of a passage from Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo — it becomes difficult for a publication to deal quietly and privately with these matters.