Go Wiki Go!
Wiki done gone and caught themselves another plagiarist. Funny cartoon here.Tim Ryan, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporter whose plagiarism was recently discovered by Wikipedia editors, has been dismissed after additional instances of plagiarism were reported. This brought his tenure to an end last week after more than twenty years at the newspaper.The above is a quote…
Wiki done gone and caught themselves another plagiarist. Funny cartoon here.
Tim Ryan, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporter whose plagiarism was recently discovered by Wikipedia editors, has been dismissed after additional instances of plagiarism were reported. This brought his tenure to an end last week after more than twenty years at the newspaper.
The above is a quote from wikipedia, who have caught more than their fair share of plagiarists lately. See, I nearly always attribute my sources. Two questions though. First, if high school students, nay primary school kids can work out that their teacher will Google sentences from their essays and catch ’em out pinching stuff, what made Tim Ryan think his readership wouldn’t? And secondly, so much writing today (not the good stuff, just the main stuff) is reworked from press releases, policy documents and so on, all documents I can get myself if I am so inclined, why would I pay for a newspaper or magazine that does a straight copy. It may not be ‘plagiarism’ if it says ‘by XYZ in The New York Post’, but hey, I could just as easily read the original article in full online. To the Australian press, please, cut down on the number of revamped, reworked articles from overseas and give original thinkers a go (look to blogs if you can’t find them).
Oh and All Hail Wiki As The New Google!
Technorati Tags Online Communities, Tim Ryan, wiki, Plagiarism,
You’re spot on, Laurel. However, as you’d probably be aware, as bad as the situation is in the mainstream media, it is much worse in many of the trade journals. I used to write several articles a year for such journals, and be paid for them. Some of these folded and others decided they could get enough “articles” from vendors they didn’t need to pay journalists, especially not non-unionised freelance journalists. Such “articles” weren’t re-written press releases but highly promotional of the vendor and their products.
I don’t mind news being extracted from press releases, provided some editing is done – for example, audio call recording systems are NOT CRM products no matter how many times their marketing persons say they are – as I don’t recieve nor want to receive all the PR material from all the companies I’m interested in.
But at the same time, enterprises buy far fewer such publications, part of the reason there aren’t as many and the survivors have smaller budgets. But are there fewer subscribers because there are fewer good and genuine articles or are there fewer good articles because their are fewer subscribers to pay for them?