Clinamen

There is speculation that a McCain speechwriter lifted some phrases about Georgia from a Wikipedia article (link via Wikipedia Blog).

According to Taegan Goddard of Political Insider, here are the three instances that people are focusing on:

First instance:

one of the first countries in the world to adopt Christianity as an official religion (Wikipedia)

vs.

one of the world's first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion (McCain)

Second instance:

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.