Regret the Error

By John E. McIntyre

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.