A NYT Lede That Duplicates Wikipedia

[YankeeFan]

Carol Vogel uses a Wikipedia entry as her own words:

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

 

[Songbird]

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

 

[Dick Whitman]

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.

 

[Versatile]

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.

 

[RecoveringJournalist]

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

 

[Dick Whitman]

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.

I don't follow.

 

[ringer]

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.

 

[Versatile]

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.

 

[Versatile]

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.

I don't follow.

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.

 

[Dick Whitman]

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.

I don't follow.

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.

 

[Versatile]

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.

 

[MisterCreosote]

The fact is that journalists recite fact after fact without the burden of noting where these facts came from.

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"?

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.

We don't?

 

[Dick Whitman]

http://www.si.com/vault/2011/03/14/106045530/too-slick-too-loud-too-successful-why-john-calipari-cant-catch-a-break

But for some coaches the discomfort with Calipari has a much earlier source. Twenty-five years ago, as a recruiting hotshot at Pitt, Calipari either stepped over an uncrossable line or was heinously slurred by a false rumor. In early 1986, while trying to dissuade a player from going to St. John's, Calipari supposedly told him that Redmen coach Lou Carnesecca was dying of cancer. Pitino, who denies ever believing the tale, says that Carnesecca, who was not sick, complained about the tactic at a Big East coaches meeting that spring.[/b]

Calipari called on Carnesecca to assure him it wasn't true; Carnesecca ever since has said he believes Calipari. But the tale ginned up an already white-hot recruiting war, tarred Calipari's name and, many believe, killed any chance of his landing the St. John's job in 1996 and 2004. When he interviewed at UMass in 1988, the first question from Ron Nathan, the head of the Minutemen's booster club, was, "Did you really say the guy was dying of cancer?"

Drexel coach Bruiser Flint, an assistant under Calipari for seven years at UMass, says, "You know what that let people think? That Cal would do or say anything to get a player. That started everything."

Not exactly. The year before, Calipari had blown into Pitt fresh from three years at Kansas, where he'd grown from an unpaid scrub doling out peas and carrots to players in the dining hall to a valued staffer. Pitt had risen fast under coach Roy Chipman, and not long after Calipari's arrival as a top assistant the program's reputation began to buckle. In the fall of 1985 two former recruits alleged they had received payoff offers—from a booster and another assistant coach—and then Chipman resigned in midseason.

 

[Versatile]

Sports Illustrated has a long history with that type of lack of attribution. It doesn't make stealing from Wikipedia any harder or easier.

 

[Dick Whitman]

http://www.si.com/more-sports/2011/07/16/dimaggio-streakend

The outs are famous now, two of them anyway: the plays by third baseman Ken Keltner, a gold glover had there been such a thing back then. Twice -- in the first inning and again in the seventh -- Keltner dived to his left, into foul ground, to glove hard ground balls down the line and take doubles away from DiMaggio. The plays at first base were bang-bang close and DiMaggio believed that the wet ground (it had rained heavily the night before) had slowed his stride, costing him.

Keltner played DiMaggio on the edge of the outfield grass. On either at-bat Joe could have dropped down a bunt and made it to first base at a trot. That was just not something he would do, not even with The Streak on the line. ("Is DiMaggio a good bunter?" Yanks manager Joe McCarthy was once asked. "We'll never know," he said.)

DiMaggio's last chance came in the eighth, bases loaded, and ended when he hit a ground ball that Cleveland shortstop Lou Boudreau fielded on a bad hop and tossed to second base to start a double play. The streak was over.

The Cleveland crowd roared as loudly as it had all night and from the Yankees dugout the players -- including future Hall of Famers Phil Rizzuto, Lefty Gomez and Bill Dickey -- watched to see what DiMaggio would do.

 

[Dick Whitman]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/08/15/leap-of-faith-4

Michele Bachmann’s father, a former Air Force staff sergeant, was an engineer who worked at a bomb factory in Iowa. He travelled around the country and to China, made his own wine, ground his own grain, and drove a gray Volkswagen bug. He was a Democrat and a student of the Civil War. “He didn’t appreciate it if any kind words were said about the South,” she said in a eulogy for him, in 2003. But he was also an “authoritarian.” In a Christmas letter to friends and family that year, she wrote, “He was a man of faults, and he was perhaps the most dominant human figure in my life.” Her parents separated in 1968, and in July, 1970, when Michele was fourteen, their divorce was finalized. The following month, in Las Vegas, her father married a woman twelve years his junior and moved to California.] Bachmann, who has three brothers, says that the split devastated her and left the family impoverished. “We had to sell our home and sell most of the things that we had and move into a little apartment,” she told me. [Her mother soon married a widower with five children.

In a speech in Minneapolis in 2006, Bachmann spoke of growing up with “the emotional struggles of not having a strong father in my life.” Two years after her father left, Bachmann joined a high-school prayer group. She had been brought up a Lutheran, but she knew little about the Bible. With the help of the members of the prayer group, she explained in the speech, she became a born-again Christian:


I didn’t know I wasn’t a believer. But they knew I wasn’t a believer, and they started praying for me. And all of a sudden the holy spirit started knocking on my heart’s door and I could hear the Lord tug me and call me to Himself, and I responded on November 1st of 1972, and I knew that I knew that I knew that I had received Jesus Christ as my lord and savior and that my life would never be the same after I made that commitment, because I knew what darkness looked like. I knew it from my home life. I absolutely understood sin, and I wanted no part of it. When Jesus Christ came in and cleaned out this dark heart, that was light. That was rest. That was peace. It was refreshment. Why would I ever want the world? I knew what that had to offer. This was great. That didn’t mean that I woke and all of a sudden I had money, all of a sudden I had position, all of a sudden I had education. It didn’t. But what it meant was that all of a sudden I had a father.

 

[MisterCreosote]

It's impossible for me to comment on those examples without knowing how the information was gathered.

The Calipari one especially reads like it's a recounting via several interviews with several different people, all of whom I'd assume are mentioned somewhere in the piece.

 

[Dick Whitman]

It's impossible for me to comment on those examples without knowing how the information was gathered.

Exactly.

 

[MisterCreosote]

I assume editors would know how it was gathered. Just like they know and sign off on the identities of "anonymous sources."

Either way, this is a gray area discussion on a thread about blatant, lazy fraudulence.

 

[Dick Whitman]

I assume editors would know how it was gathered.

But readers don't. That's more important in an age of eroding trust in the media.