Expert (Me): Copying Big Chunks Of Wikipedia Is Definitely Plagiarism, Whether In First-Year Comp Or Your Dissertation
How are we even having this discussion? Oh, right: Bigots.
Just before Christmas, rightwing shit-stirrers (“Operatives”? “Activists”? Nah, too polite) got their wish and forced Claudine Gay to resign from her position as president of Harvard. It was ostensibly about “plagiarism” in her dissertation a million years ago. Of course, it wasn’t so much about plagiarism qua plagiarism; plagiarism was simply the crowbar by which rightwingers could force out a Black woman who was at the head of an elite institution, while lamenting that if it weren’t for “diversity” such a terrible lady never would have been in the job anyway.
No one really believed America’s Rightwing Shitstirring Apparatus gives even a nanofuck about the fine points of MLA or APA citation style, or about whether a paraphrase with a citation veers into plagiarism by using a few too many words from the source. In Gay’s case, the examples were almost all instances where she cited a source, but failed to use quotation marks or blockquoting to indicate the words were the source’s. That’s generally regarded as sloppy work, but a lesser academic sin than copying passages with no citation at all and presenting it as your own work. If you were really trying to pass off others’ writing as your own, you wouldn’t leave the breadcrumbs naming the source. The cure generally involves going back in and adding quotes, and getting the stinkeye from your prof or advisor. (When I taught first-year college writing, I never failed students who did that. I did fail students who never provided a hint of a citation.)
But if the American Right were sticklers for scrupulously avoiding misuse of others’ words, Melania Trump would have been brought up on charges for the large uncredited chunks of a Michelle Obama speech one of her aides added into her 2016 Republican Convention speech.
Ah, but we digress. Y’see, kids, one of the loudest screamers for the head of Claudine Gay was a billionaire hedge fund bozo named Bill Ackman, who fancies himself a great reformer of American higher education. After Gay stepped down as president, Ackman went on to call for her to be forced off the Harvard faculty altogether, for the good of the school and possibly because he’s a power-tripping asshole who gets his jollies from pretending he’s a watchdog of academic fucking integrity. (That’s our working hypothesis at least.)
Last week, Business Insider published a pair of stories in which it did its own computer-driven plagiarism check of the 2010 dissertation written by Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, a tenured prof at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the first story, the paper found a whole buncha citation problems in which Oxman had lifted passages from other scholars and failed to use quotation marks or blockquoting to indicate she was using their exact words, although she did provide a citation. Another example included a full paragraph used without quotes or a citation.
The second story revealed that Oxman used text from “more than a dozen Wikipedia articles” without citation, and a whole bunch of other examples of text she incorporated into her writing without any citation or quotation at all. That’s a bad thing, especially the Very Idea Of Copying Fucking Wikipedia In Your Dissertation, Because Really, Wikipedia?
Ackman has responded to the Business Insider stories by having a rich-man’s how-dare-you hissy, accusing the newspaper not of writing anything inaccurate, but of unfairly attacking a private citizen (Dr. Oxman) because she’s his wife and also because she’s Israeli and how dare they. He also took to Twitter to declare war on everyone, as the New York Times reports:
In response, he wrote, he would begin a plagiarism review of all current M.I.T. faculty members; Sally Kornbluth, the president of M.I.T.; and the university’s governing body, and would share the results with the public. “This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews,” Mr. Ackman wrote.
He posted later on Friday that he would also review the work of reporters at Business Insider.
It was unclear whether he was targeting Dr. Kornbluth because his wife had received her Ph.D. at the university or because of what he considered Dr. Kornbluth’s inadequate denunciation of antisemitism at a congressional hearing last month.
Since then, Ackman has also twote that in his completely objective opinion, the things Dr. Oxman did weren’t even plagiarism at all, although they were pretty much what Gay had done, not that he acknowledged that.
Ackman also denied that borrowing stuff from Wikipedia without quotes or attribution is plagiarism necessarily, which … is a thing he said, all right. From the Independent:
The billionaire noted that 15 of the outlet’s 28 alleged discoveries of plagiarism “were definitions of words or terms that Neri may have used from Wikipedia.” To showcase the striking parallels, Business Insider showed side-by-side images of Dr Oxman’s writings and the Wikipedia definitions of terms like, “weaving” or “heat flux.”
“Is this plagiarism?” Mr Ackman asked on X. “Let’s assume that in writing her dissertation Neri used Wikipedia as a dictionary for these terms and it is deemed to be plagiarism, does it any way affect the quality and originality of the research in her dissertation? I think that’s worth an important discussion among the experts.”
He continued, “It does not strike me as plagiarism, nor do I think it takes anything away from her work.
“I am not sure who would even complain that they were not cited properly,” Mr Ackman added.
Oh dear. Wikipedia is a largely anonymous enterprise, so plagiarizing it is a victimless crime?
Ackman even Twote, insanely, that his attorneys looked up an old copy of MIT’s plagiarism policy from 2009 and found that the university didn’t even mention Wikipedia, so Ha Ha Herman, Charlie Brown, no plagiarism!
He went on, again with no apparent idea what plagiarism even is, asking
What are the chances that Business Insider examined the MIT handbook "as far back as 2007" and didn't notice that there was no requirement to cite Wikipedia nor was it even mentioned until April 4, 2013 […]
Which is when MIT said Wikipedia wasn’t a reliable source. But honestly, that was pretty well known long before that, at least to us drones teaching first-year comp.
No, no, no. You have to show your sources, like how we have put the words from the newspapers in blockquotes here, and provided links. Even with Wikipedia. And nobody should be using Wikipedia, as a primary source anyway — I always told my students to read Wikipedia for background, and if something was good, then sure, go to the linked source and use it.
Also too, it’s pretty fucking rich for the New York Times to suddenly be worried that charges of plagiarism can be weaponized by political bad actors, after it published 62 goddamn articles on Gay’s alleged crimes.
For fuckssake, the end, OPEN THREAD.
[Independent / Business Insider / NYT / Business Insider / Forbes]
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