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.

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.

The Books of The Times review in The Arts on Feb. 26 and an article in House & Home on Thursday described the experiences of Margaret B. Jones, who said that she had been a foster child and gang member in South Central Los Angeles and survived to write a book about that life. “Margaret B. Jones” turned out to be a pseudonym, and her story a complete fabrication, as The Times reported on Tuesday. An article about how her publisher, and the newspaper, failed to discover the truth earlier appears today. Link

I
am distressed to find myself reported as participating in a "literary
spat", and as "pouring scorn" on an individual, comedian Peter Kay, for
whom I actually feel nothing but goodwill (Heard the one about the
atheist who scorned a comedian for his belief in a comforting God?
March 8). The explanation is as follows. I am one of those whom
reporters regularly telephone for a soundbite. Last week, I was fed a
quotation from somebody, previously unknown to me, who said he believed
in God because he found it comforting. Assuming I was one of a panel of
usual suspects being asked to comment on this rather common sentiment,
I gave my usual response.
Now it seems
that I was being set up by a hired publicity machine, so that I would
appear to be mounting a personal attack upon a particular individual
who is my rival for a literary prize. And I also learn that the
quotation they selected is an unrepresentative one from a book I
haven’t read (I look forward to doing so), which is competing with my
own for the same prize. I hope you will allow me publicly to apologise
to Peter Kay and wish him well in the competition.
Richard Dawkins
Oxford

The Guardian story that set it off:

It may be the least likely literary spat in history. Richard Dawkins,
the evolutionary biologist famous for his rottweiler attacks on
religion, has poured scorn on Peter Kay, the northern comic best known
for a gentle joke about garlic bread.
The comedian and the scientist
are rivals in the Galaxy British Book Awards, in which Dawkins is a
frontrunner for his bestselling atheist diatribe The God Delusion, and
Kay is nominated for his popular memoirs The Sound of Laughter.

The controversy erupted after Dawkins read an excerpt from Kay’s
autobiography, in which he wrote: "I believe in a God of some kind, in
some sort of higher being. Personally I find it very comforting."
The
believer-baiting academic responded with contempt. "How can you take
seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it
‘comforting’?" he said.
"If evidence were found for a supreme
being I would change my mind instantly -with pride and with great
surprise. Would I find it comforting? What matters is what is true, and
we discover truth by evidence, not what we would ‘like’." Kay, at
present appearing in The Producers at the Palace theatre in Manchester,
was unavailable for comment last night and his publicist declined to
respond on his behalf.
In fact, while his book has extensive
passages on religion, Kay rejects the Catholic church and disputes the
divinity of Jesus. The comedian, who was educated at a convent school,
writes: "I believe that a man called Jesus did walk the earth at one
time but I don’t think he was the superhero that the Bible makes him
out to be … I think Jesus was just an ordinary person, like me and
you."
He also criticises the teaching of the nuns at his school
in Bolton, referring to an episode in which pupils were taught about
abortion by watching a gory slide show and passing around a plastic
replica of an aborted foetus.
He writes: "[The nuns] bundled a
girl out of the hall when she informed them that her sister had had an
abortion. I half expected to see her head impaled on the school gates
at hometime – come to think of it, I never did see her again … shit!"
There
was consternation yesterday in the comedy world over Dawkins’s choice
of target. Steve Bennett, editor of the comedy website chortle.co.uk,
said: "I know he came from a Catholic school but most of the stuff in
the book from that is anecdotal funny stories. There were some nuns he
liked and some nuns he didn’t like. Peter Kay’s not an obvious person
to be at the centre of this sort of controversy. His stock in trade is
a cosy world of things we can all relate to, and I suppose a belief in
God is part of that cosy world."
It is not the first time Dawkins’s atheist militancy has encountered an unlikely opponent.
He
was criticised recently for describing Nadia Eweida, the BA employee
who refused to take off her cross at work, as having "one of the most
stupid faces I’ve ever seen".
The Phoenix Nights star’s memoirs,
which record his childhood and rise to the threshold of stardom, were
the celebrity publishing sensation of last year. The Sound of Laughter
sold a record-breaking 600,000 copies in the first two months after
publication and sales are now approaching 1m. It is in the running for
the book of the year and biography of the year awards.
Kay’s line
in Phoenix Nights: "Garlic bread – it’s the future, I’ve tasted it,"
was named best one-liner in television comedy in a poll last year…

The Nov. 28 book review "Pigskin Philosophy"
quoted author Michael Lewis’ assertion that NFL quarterbacks threw
7,583 passes in 1960. In fact, quarterbacks from two different
professional football leagues, the NFL and the AFL, threw that number
of passes in 1960, according to a statistician Lewis consulted. Lewis
says that he has alerted his publisher to the mistake; a correction
will be made in future printings of the book. The review also cited the
total number of passes thrown in 1960 and 2000 as an indication of the
increasing popularity of the passing game. That comparison, however,
does not account for the increase in the total number of games played
each season during that period. A more appropriate measure is the
number of passes thrown per game. The review has been corrected. Link

"We won’t be stopping publication of the book, but when we reprint it,
we will take the letter out," said Emma Mitchell, a publicist for
publisher Hutchinson. "We’re not panicking about it"

Wilson’s US publisher, the venerable Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is taking a different approach. From a story in Publisher’s Weekly Daily:

…FSG’s plans to bring out Betjeman: A Life in the U.S. in
December were thwarted by the bogus document; when the scandal broke,
the house already had brought in finished books from the U.K. to sell
in the U.S., which contained the fraudulent letter as well as incorrect
information regarding it. The solution, according to FSG senior v-p of
marketing and publicity Jeff Seroy, was to include an erratum note from
Wilson in all 10,000 copies of the book’s first editions, and to
correct the text (and omit Hillier’s made-up document) in all future
editions…
In his erratum note, Wilson comes across as a good sport, explaining
how he received the letter and his hindsight view: "I should have smelt
a rat when I wrote back to ‘Eve de Harben,’ an anagram of ‘Ever been
had?’" Keeping a stiff upper lip, Wilson ends with the declaration that
the "scurrilous forgery will be removed in any future reprints."

JK ROWLING has been forced to correct a plot blunder in a Harry Potter book — after fans spotted it.
The author credits Hermione Granger with 11 top exam results in the
first hardback edition of book six, Harry Potter And The Half-Blood
Prince.
But in book five — Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix — we are told she takes TEN examinations.
Publishers Bloomsbury have corrected the paperback edition to give Hermione nine “outstanding” and one “exceeds expectations” in her Ordinary Wizarding Levels.
In the uncorrected version, Harry gets seven OWLs with
honours, Ron also achieves seven, while Hermione gets ten
“outstandings” and one “exceeds expectations”.
One of the first fan websites to spot the error was www.mugglenet.com. It is believed to be the first blunder in the Potter series, which has earned JK, 41, more than £500million…
Bloomsbury admitted last night: “We can confirm there was an error.”
A publishing source said: “With a series like this it is inevitable a
blunder like this would occur. It is just remarkable it didn’t happen
earlier. It was only a small error and easily reversible.”
Hermione actress Emma Watson, 17, is a real-life brainbox. She got eight A*s grades and two As in her GCSEs.

Last week a software program company official ran
Ann Coulter’s columns through a ‘match-text’ program, frequently used
by teachers to detect original work. The New York Post cited two
columns in which some text matched other published materials and also
mentioned three snippets in her book, ‘Godless: The Church of
Liberalism.’
In addition to looking at the columns mentioned in
the New York Post story, we also reviewed a sampling of other columns
that have been mentioned in the media. Like her book publisher, Crown,
Universal Press Syndicate finds no merits to the allegations of
plagiarism brought by the software company executive. There are only so
many ways you can rewrite a fact and minimal matching text is not
plagiarism.
Universal Press Syndicate is confident in the ability
of Ms. Coulter, an attorney and frequent media target, to know when to
make attribution and when not to. We also have confidence in our
35-year history of detecting fraudulent and unethical work, having
represented conservatives and liberal commentators alike.

E&P also got comment from John Barrie, whose company did the initial report on her work. On the one had he said some of her work is "uncited, it is unoriginal, and it does look
like plagiarism." Then he seems to hedge a bit: "Our technology is not designed to make those
judgment calls," So it’s up to her syndiacte and publisher. As of now, they stand behind her work.

Her Aug. 3, 2005, column, ‘Read My Lips: No New
Liberals,’ about U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter, includes six
passages, ranging from 10 to 48 words each, that appeared 15 years
earlier in the same order in an L.A. Times article, headlined ‘Liberals
Leery as New Clues Surface on Souter’s Views.’ But nowhere in that
column does she mention the L.A. Times or the story’s writer, David G.
Savage.


Her June 29, 2005, column, ‘Thou Shalt Not Commit
Religion,’ incorporates 10 facts on National Endowment for the
Arts-funded work that originally appeared in the same order in a 1991
Heritage Foundation report, ‘The National Endowment for the Arts:
Misusing Taxpayers’ Money.’ But again, the Heritage Foundation isn’t
credited.

We can’t get a hold of the full Post story, but one can imagine that the cribbed book text identified by The Rude Pundit checked out when iThenticate went to work. "Just as Coulter plays free and loose with her citations in ‘Godless,’ she obviously does the same in her columns," Barrie told the Post. We’ll add more as it becomes available. More from the story:

…John Barrie, the creator of a leading
plagiarism-recognition system, claimed he found at least three
instances of what he calls "textbook plagiarism" in the leggy blond
pundit’s "Godless: the Church of Liberalism" after he ran the book’s
text through the company’s digital iThenticate program.
He
also says he discovered verbatim lifts in Coulter’s weekly column,
which is syndicated to more than 100 newspapers, including the Fort
Lauderdale (Fla.) Sun-Sentinel and Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle.
Barrie, CEO of iParadigms, told The Post that one 25-word passage from
the "Godless" chapter titled "The Holiest Sacrament: Abortion" appears
to have been lifted nearly word for word from Planned Parenthood
literature published at least 18 months before Coulter’s 281-page book
was released.
A separate, 24-word string from the chapter "The
Creation Myth" appeared about a year earlier in the San Francisco
Chronicle with just one word change – "stacked" was changed to "piled."
Another 33-word passage that appears five pages into "Godless"
allegedly comes from a 1999 article in the Portland (Maine) Press
Herald…

Just how far did American Apparel’s Dov Charney worm his way inside NYT Mag writer Jaime Wolf’s head during their time together?
We ask because there is a rather Freudian typo in Wolf’s lengthy feature on the schmatte/sexual liberation/anti-sweatshop entrepreneur. The story’s lead paragraph mentions two books found in Charney’s office. One is "The Concise 48 Laws of Power" and the other, according to the Times Mag piece, is "The Medium Is the Massage." Freud and McLuhan, together at last. The error title has been fixed changed in the online version of the article, though no correction has been added to the story. We wonder: was it Wolf’s goof, or did an editor give McLuhan’s book the happy ending? The error rubbed us the wrong way, and the lingering question tugs at us. Only a correction could finish us off. (Apologies.)
UPDATE: A few readers and Jamie Wolf have correctly pointed out that the book by McLuhan was indeed titled "The Medium Is The Massage." Just check Amazon, for example. So: this is not a typo. Though someone on the Times website seems to think it is; or perhaps the Times online style book calls for the more accepted title?  Rather, this is a continuation of a typo. The "massage" title was itself a mistake. Below is a response that McLuhan’s son sent to a person who inquired about the title:

“Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter, it had on the cover "Massage" as it still does. The title
should have read "The Medium is the Message" but the typesetter had
made an error. When Marshall McLuhan saw the typo he exclaimed, "Leave
it alone! It’s great, and right on target!" Now there are four possible
readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate:
"Message" and "Mess Age," "Massage" and "Mass Age"."

So, apologies to Wolf for taking this too far. And thanks to everyone who showed us the error of our ways. We’ll of course note this in our corrections post this Friday.
An scan of the page is below. Click for larger view.

In a Sept. 22 story for the 50th anniversary of the publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s "Lolita," The Associated Press erroneously quoted the novel’s opening. The excerpt is "My sin, my soul" not "My sin. My soul."

Mnookin says he only made a few errors but, to
continue his commitment to “transparency,” he is “offering up a
relative rarity in the world of book publishing: a corrections section.”


Most of the corrections (like the Times’) are of a
minor scale, such as the executive dining room of the paper being
located on the 11th, not 14th floor, and Clyde Haberman stringing from
City College of New York, not Columbia University.


The more substantial correction concerns the
original’s assertion that two Timesmen, Jon Landman and Jim Roberts,
had a testy relationship. Mnookin notes that this was based on a New
York magazine story and that Landman tells him that though the two
editors are not “drinking buddies,” they do share mutual respect. 

The errors mentioned above were of course easily preventable by making a few phone calls, but Mnookin’s willingness to add a corrections section is commendable.