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thuswise to swerve

Plagiarizing Wikipedia

Submitted by Jim Brown on November 15, 2007 - 3:26pm.

A couple of new(ish) stories about plagiarism and Wikipedia. They involve some folks using content from Wikipedia without attributing.

First, a book that uses verbatim text from Wikipedia.

Second, Baidu is a Chinese internet company that is one of Wikipedia's biggest intellectual property challenges. Because Wikipedia is banned in China (you know, because it acknowledges that people were killed in Tiananmen Square), Baidu has its own open-content encyclopedia called Baidu Baike. The problem is that they take a great deal of their content straight from Wikipedia without attributing it.

Wikipedia is published under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means that anyone is free to use the content so long as they attribute it. The Wikimedia Foundation hasn't sued anyone yet, and I doubt they ever will. However, stories like this show that the intellectual property issues with Wikipedia work both (many) ways.

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"The atoms, as their own weight bears them down plumb through the void, at scarce determined times, in scarce determined places, from their course decline a little- call it, so to speak, mere changed trend. For were it not their wont thuswise to swerve, down would they fall, each one, like drops of rain, through the unbottomed void; and then collisions ne'er could be nor blows among the primal elements; and thus nature would never have created aught."

-Lucretius, Of The Nature of Things

About Me

My name is Jim Brown and I'm a Ph.D. Candidate in Rhetoric at the University of Texas. I teach courses in Rhetoric, Literature, and New Media. This blog mostly focuses on my academic work, but you'll also find occasional posts about music or baseball. I also maintain two other blogs, and you can see all of my blog writings by viewing this RSS feed. I'm a Pittsburgh Pirates fan. This lets you know that I'm kind of a masochist and explains the name of my dog.

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