Friday, January 20, 2006
WIkipedia to the rescue -- Part 2
Wikipedia's heroics just won't stop. Even while it was out-reporting ABC this week, one of its contributors was outing a plagiarist reporter. Tim Ryan had been an entertainment columnist for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin for 21 years. Talk about job security! And he had to go and blow it! Yeesh.The paper found a bunch of incidents of plagiarism from different sources, but what apparently tipped them off was when "an attentive Wikipedia editor noted similarities between a Wikipedia article and one of Ryan's columns," reports Slashdot's CmdrTaco.
Alas, as so often happens, the heroes failed to get their due. While the "Star-Bulletin has admitted to the plagiarism, they failed to publicly acknowledge that Wikipedia was responsible for bringing this situation to light," Slashdot notes.
In other words, they used Wikipedia's reporting without crediting it. What's that called again?
