Wikipedia author confronts Ed Wegman

Wegman: “It’s not reprinted 100 percent like you had it.”

Wikipedia guy: “No, you added another paragraph at the end and you changed the headline. . . . You even copied the typos that I’ve corrected on my website. It was taken verbatim and reprinted in your paper.”

The original author got a check for $500 but, unfortunately, no free subscription to “Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics” (a $1400-$2800 value).

P.S. To those who think I’m being mean to Wegman: I haven’t yet heard that he’s apologized to the people whose work he copied without attribution, or to the people who spent their time tracking all this down, or to the U.S. Congress for misrepresenting his expertise in his official report.

Everyone makes mistakes, and just about everyone has ethical lapses at times. But when you get caught you’re supposed to make apology and restitution.

6 thoughts on “Wikipedia author confronts Ed Wegman

  1. For those having troble keeping up with Wegman and his protege Said, here’s a list of the 5 main problematic works in the Wegman & Said canon (with pointers to much discussion of each)

    http://deepclimate.org/2011/10/04/said-and-wegman-2009-suboptimal-scholarship/#conclusion

    Here’s a complete discussion of the 2009 WIREs Comp Stat article by Said & Wegman, “Roadmap to Optimation”

    http://deepclimate.org/2011/10/04/said-and-wegman-2009-suboptimal-scholarship

    And here’s a discussion of the latest shenanigans, where the editors of WIREs Comp Stat allowed the authors to do over “Roadmap” and another article. Of course, it helps when the editors and authors are one and the same (or more precisely two and the same).

    http://deepclimate.org/2012/03/16/wiley-coverup-complete-wegman-and-said-redo-hides-plagiarism-and-errors/

    Then we have the curious duo of misconduct decisions at GMU, where the *same* text was considered plagiarism in one obscure paper, but not when copied into a related congressional report.

    http://deepclimate.org/2012/02/22/gmu-contradictory-decisions-on-wegman-plagiarism-in-csda-but-not-in-congressional-report/

    Here is small part of the congressional report (known as the Wegman Report) side-by-side with the Wikipedia article it was copied from (at least three text books were also copied), that was found *not* to be plagiarized by GMU. Cyan highlighted text is identical, with trivial changes in yellow.

    http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/wegman-social-networks-v-2-1.pdf

  2. I received a review request from Wiley Computational Statistics recently. I answered that I would be happy to review the paper as soon as Wegman and Said resign from the journal’s editorial board, because I think frauds should not run journals. Unsurprisingly, I have not received a response since…

  3. Laurens (d H?):

    Good for you … but sadly, if your reply went to the managing editor, Yasmin Said, the chances of it getting any action are low.
    On the other hand, if you copied the Editorial Advisors or some other people in Wiley management, that might (or might not) help get something to happen.

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