Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-05-17/In the news

Law project against plagiarism, plagiarized

Deputy presents law project to increase sanctions against plagiarism, copy-pasted from Wikipedia without attribution

On 6 May, Argentine Deputy Gerónimo Vargas Aignasse presented a law project to increase sanctions against those who commit plagiarism. But in the project proposal, to define plagiarism, he copied 331 words from the Spanish Wikipedia article on the topic (es:plagio), without any kind of attribution. The copy-pasted text even includes square brackets from the (only partially removed) footnotes in the Wikipedia article.

It wasn't the first time that Aignasse copied text from Wikipedia into law proposals. In a proposal to prohibit barra bravas from travelling to South Africa for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, he copied 314 words from the corresponding article.

A week later the Deputy admitted in an interview with Clarín that he copied the text from Wikipedia, and that he had done it before. Nevertheless, he argued that he had no obligation to cite the source, which could be considered ironic given the fact that the Deputy's law proposal seeks, precisely, to punish those who don't cite sources.

The incident was reported in English by Techdirt.

References

• "Presentó un proyecto contra el plagio, plagiando a Wikipedia" by María Arce, Clarín, 16 May 2010, page 18

Briefly

• A front-page article in the Sunday Jerusalem Post by Haviv Rettig casts a critical eye on pro-Palestinian editors rewriting history on the English and Hebrew Wikipedias.

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• Wow, how ironic!—Chris!_c/t 18:59, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Go figure. Another idiot politician.--Rockfang (talk) 19:50, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• You'd think that if he was going to copy-paste he'd at least clean it up a little bit. Seems like he truly put zero thought and zero work into his proposal. Burpelson AFB (talk) 21:07, 18 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• The expression "hoist by one's own petard" springs to mind. – ukexpat (talk) 01:52, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Israel Palestine Collaboration/Current Article Issues/Archive. Outside organizing of editing#Jerusalem Post. Israeli-Palestinian conflict rages on Wikipedia. It's about the Jerusalem Post story mentioned in the Signpost in the "Briefly" section. --Timeshifter (talk) 10:51, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Well, it is the word moron in definition. --Ularevalo98 (talk) 18:10, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Everybody can sue wikipedia if it infringes copyright. We should ask our lawyers to sue this guy or any other how copies from wikipedia without attribution and at least make him ask for public pardon... . I have seen even a published book for physicians who had whole chapters copied from WP (See here). Why does everybody think that wikipedia is not copyrighted?.--Garrondo (talk) 23:17, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  It isn't; it's copylefted. --Yair rand (talk) 18:40, 25 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  "Copyleft" is a form of license that depends on the licensed work being under copyright. It is not an alternative to copyright; it is, in fact, dependent on copyright. TJRC (talk) 22:12, 26 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  it is copyrighted with an especific licence which specifies that to use it all the text where it is included also has to have the same license and the authors have to be named... So of course it is...--Garrondo (talk) 07:33, 27 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• This article was plagiarised by User:Orangemike when he copied it into Gerónimo Vargas Aignasse with no attribution. See "Please fix your plagiarism of SignPost article about plagiarism for a law project against plagiarism.". -- Jeandré, 2010-08-25t17:53z