It seems that Wired editor Chris Anderson has plagiarized a number of passages for his new book Free: The future of a radical price from Wikipedia.
While reviewing the book, journalists at The Virginia Quarterly Review discovered that Anderson had taken definitions, and the origins of several of colloquialisms, from Wikipedia, including those for Free Lunch, Usury, Learning Curve, and others.
When questioned, Anderson quickly admitted fault offering the following as an explanation for the apparent plagiarism:
All those are my screw-ups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources…
This all came about once we collapsed the notes into the copy. I had the original sources footnoted, but once we lost the footnotes at the 11th hour, 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.
It sounds like he will add the proper accreditations in the next pressings of the book.
