This one is just too good not to share. I came across it via a link from Retraction Watch.
Director of Paris journalism school suspended for plagiarism:
Executive director of journalism school at Sciences-Po university suspended while the university investigates accusations she was plagiarising other people’s articles for columns in the Huffington Post . . .The website Arret Sur Images said it fed around 20 of her columns into an online plagiarism checker and found that in half of them at least one sentence, but more often two or three, had been lifted from other articles and presented unchanged and without attribution.
Hey, I taught at Sciences-Po! (But I didn’t know this person.)
What’s funny about this story, though, was that she plagiarized, and risked losing her career, to publish at . . . the Huffington Post!? That’s what I call high risk, low return.
This is as ridiculous as if a prominent statistician had destroyed his reputation by plagiarizing review articles in some obscure journal on, umm, I dunno, “Interdisciplinary Reviews”? Nah, that could never happen.
There, for a minute, I thought that Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail had taken a new job.
Do people read the Huff Post expecting to see original contest? I see nothing wrong with occasionally lifting a sentence for a Huff Post article. Who cares if she copied a fact from Wikipedia?
+1
Roger:
I doubt anyone cares at all about what she’s writing for Huffington Post. That’s what’s funny about it, that she’d bother to cheat with so little to gain. What she was doing seems like the academic equivalent of trying to supplement your income by knocking over a bunch of falafal stands.
Hold on. “One or two sentences”. Couldn’t that be luck.
Think the proverbial monkey that types Hamlet by chance. Surely it is not plagiarizing. The monkey cannot read even.
Do these online plagiarism checker come with some background info? Sort of like positive predictive value. With so many “macthes” occurring just by chance and people’s general incredulity to spurious relationships, I’m wondering if these tools make their users rush to guilty verdicts.
I cannot find the essay right now, but there’s an excellent short-fiction story describing a dystopian future world where no one can be creative any more because whatever they come up (music, prose, poetry) with has already been written by someone, sometime & they have a massive supercomputer that has indexed everything ever written & flags out repetition (mostly serendipitous) instantly.
The nit-picky plagiarism obsession sometimes reminds me of that.
Rahul:
As I’ve written many times before, my problem is not with the copying, it’s with the lack of attribution. With no paper trail it’s hard for readers to figure out where the ideas came from and, in the case of a reported incident, what actually happened. This is the point that Basbøll and I make in our papers. I would have no problem with people copying whatever they find interesting and posting on the Huffington Post. But the quality of such contributions is degraded by not saying where they came from, and our communication channels are degraded when wrongly-sourced material is mixed in.
Again, the criticism is never of copying, it’s always of copying (and, sometimes, altering by adding errors, in the case of Wegman) without attribution. Never in these discussions have Basbøll, I, or anyone else criticized plagiarists for lack of creativity; we’ve criticized them for obscuring the sources of their material.
+1
Personally I think Andrew over-obsesses about Plagiarism.
yes, and the arguments seem rather vague musings about the quality of ideas and communications being seriously degraded by lack of attribution– a very difficult proposition to demonstrate as a general truth.
Jed:
As a statistician, I firmly believe that more information is better. For an author to gratuitously throw away information, that’s just uncool. If the source of the quotation doesn’t matter, please let me as the reader judge this. Don’t hide the source. I think the burden should be on the plagiarist to demonstrate why it’s ok for them to deceive by obscuring the source of their material.