A NYT Lede That Duplicates Wikipedia

Carol Vogel uses a Wikipedia entry as her own words:

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/an-nyt-lede-too-close-for-wikipedia-comfort_b221364

 

Dave Anderson from Tenafly wouldn't have recommended the story.

 

That's really bad, and a lot of it is attributable (no pun intended) to the fact that journalists, alone among non-fiction wordsmiths, never feel like they have to source or cite their work. Like it's beneath them/us.

 

I do believe you are driving an agenda here. If the author wanted a citation, Wikipedia provides them quite handily to be copied.

Plagiarists gon' plagiarize.

 

Maybe the writer is applying to be the next media director for the City of Casselberry.

 

I don't follow.

 

How do we know that it's not the reverse: that Wikipedia didn't steal those lines from the NYT story?

Wiki entries never have a date on them and are very quick to be updated.

 

Wikipedia pages have very thorough edit histories including time down to the second.

 

You have had that thought in your head recently and wanted to get it out now. But academics get caught plagiarizing Wikipedia all the time.

 

It seems pretty futile to attempt to hash out when and under what circumstances I had a thought, and how it subsequently made a path to this thread. Not to mention completely irrelevant.

The fact is that journalists recite fact after fact without the burden of noting where these facts came from. That's not right to me. And what ends up happening is that a NYT journalist summarizes the facts from a Wikipedia entry, and it's plagiarism. All she has to do is open that paragraph with, "According to Wikipedia," and she's fine.

But we have for some reason decided, either as a matter or readability or because it breaks the fourth wall, that we don't do that. I've never understood that. There were many times when I was working, writing a historical take-out piece, that I would include a sources box, even if I didn't cite in the course of the piece.

 

There are different circumstances for everything, but certainly in writing about a historical event, I would expect some degree of credit. And The New York Times is rather good about that usually. But if sports is the toy department, I have no clue what Arts & Leisure falls under.

 

We do? With facts that aren't common knowledge?

Is it "LeBron James plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers," or "LeBron James plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers, according to owner Dan Gilbert"?

We don't?