My upcoming plagiarism report, How should I present it? Options

[Daniel Brandt]

I need suggestions on how to present my plagiarism report at wikipedia-watch.org. I still have several weeks of work to do, despite the fact that I've been working a few hours a day on it for the last three weeks.

I'm far enough along in terms of separating the signal from the noise, that I can now predict that the report will end up with between 100 and 300 examples. Here's a throwaway example, that will probably get corrected as soon as someone from Wikipedia sees this post:

Wikipedia version as of mid-September, 2006

Source that was plagiarized

Most of my examples are similar to this -- except they're not from Britannica, but rather from everywhere imaginable. Almost all of the original sources have clear copyright notices on them, and the source is not acknowledged on the Wikipedia article, and anywhere from several sentences to several paragraphs are plagiarized.

My question is, "How can I format the report so that anyone looking at it will get the picture, within a few clicks, that Wikipedia has a plagiarism problem?"

So far my best idea is to have a doorway page explaining that my examples were culled from a sampling of slightly less than one percent of the 1.4 million English-language Wikipedia articles. If I have 200 examples, then we can presume that there are about 20,000 plagiarized articles in Wikipedia that no one has yet discovered. No one has made any attempt to discover them, and no one ever will. It's just too hard. Even for programmers with a pipeline into automated Google inquiries, it's still too hard. There's an amazing amount of manual checking that's required to reduce the noise without throwing out the signal.

This doorway page will link to 200 subpages (Example 001, Example 002, ... Example 200). Each of the subpages will be titled "Plagiarism on Wikipedia - Example 001" and have a link to the source, plus a link to the version on Wikipedia as of mid-September when I grabbed the page. Then below this, the text-portion only from that page (this is easy to strip out of the XML versions of the article that I already have) will be reproduced, and the sections that are plagiarized from the source will be in highlighted in background yellow.

The effect will be that the visitor to the doorway page is given some information on how the examples were found, and is invited to click randomly on any of the 200 examples to see for themselves. I'm linking to the mid-September version, since it's possible that many editors will start cleaning up these 200 examples. One way they will try to clean it up is to acknowledge the source, but that still doesn't solve the problem that entire paragraphs were copied verbatim. They'll have to change sentences around too.

Therefore, I predict that Jimmy will claim that Wikipedia is amazingly free from plagiarism, because Wikipedia has always had a zero-tolerance policy. (This will be a lie -- there have been no efforts to identify plagiarism at Wikipedia.) Then he will zap totally all 200 articles (no history, no nothing) so that the links to the September version on my subpages won't work. That's why I have to reproduce the text from the article and highlight the plagiarized material. If I don't, my report will not be convincing after Jimmy zaps the 200 articles.

Any other ideas?

[Somey]

One more thing...

Another way they'll probably attack this will be to delete any mention of it in Wikipedia itself, under the pretense that Brandt "self-publishes" and is therefore not a "reliable source." As it turns out, plans are already underway to replace WP:NOR and WP:V with a new, "more cohesive" policy that will help them squelch any dissent over the plagiarism issue, ensuring that they can sweep the whole thing under the rug as soon as possible:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Att...blished_sources

And I'll give you one guess as to who's the author of this new proposed policy:

A self-published source is a published source, online or on paper, that has not been subject to any form of independent fact-checking, or where no one stands between the writer and the act of publication. Anyone can create a website or pay to have a book published and then claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason, self-published books, personal websites, and blogs are usually not acceptable as reliable sources.

They're awfully predictable sometimes, aren't they? It's kind of sad, in a way.

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This post has been edited by Joey:

[Daniel Brandt]

The approach here might be to submit the matter for publication. You could either write it yourself for some reputable publication, or offer your facts to a reputable publication. Since it is a well-organized and documented study, some professional journal might take it.

It was Seigenthaler's idea to do a plagiarism study of Wikipedia in the first place. He asked a couple of journalism professors to assign a couple of students to it, and mentioned this to me in an email. I thought about this, and soon realized that any student wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of separating the signal from the noise. You need experience with Wikipedia, you need programming skills, you need a pipeline into automated Google queries, and you need a huge amount of time -- much more time than a student has for a single course.

I decided that Seigenthaler's idea had merit, and realized that I was one of the few people who could do this. He knows I'm doing it, and he's delighted that I'm doing it. You can be sure that before the report is made live on my website, he and I will work together to find an interested journalist from mainstream media (maybe the AP or the NYT) who would like a scoop. When the scoop is published, at that instant the study goes live. Until then, there's nothing Jimmy and Brad and Danny can do, because they don't know which 200 articles will end up as my examples.