A lot’s been said about Waldo Jaquith of the Virginia Quarterly Review‘s shocking takedown of Wired editor Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, in which Anderson appears to have lifted nearly a dozen lengthy passages almost verbatim from uncredited sources. Many look like they were stolen from Wikipedia. Jaquith does a terrific job of painstakingly detailing his rather unbelievable findings (Anderson seems to have lifted Wikipedia passages on usury, Benjamin Babbitt and free lunches, among other things). Anderson, who edits one of my favorite magazines, has been roundly criticized and has, to his credit, apologized.
However, Anderson’s rather lame explanations — his “screwups” were due to his “inability to find a good citation format for web sources” and the footnotes were lost “at the 11th hour” — along with the critiques — that Anderson should have better attributed Wikipedia passages or put quotation marks around them — miss the most important issue here. Wikipedia is not a reliable source. No respectable author should use it as a primary information source, regardless of whether and how he or she attributes information to the people’s encyclopedia.
I’ve harped on this before — in this book review, and this one — but using Wikipedia as a source of factual information is irresponsible and lazy. Sure, Wikipedia is often right. There’s much to be said for the wisdom of crowds. I often use Wikipedia for quick and dirty background research. But I’d never use anything I learned on Wikipedia in a published story or review without double-checking the fact somewhere else. That’s because Wikipedia entries can be changed (and corrupted) by any single person with an internet connection. On Wikipedia, such people are often cloaked in anonymity. Attributing something to Wikipedia is akin to saying “According to an anonymous internet user who I blindly assume has his or her facts straight.” That’s dangerous.
Attribution is beside the point. Who cares whether Anderson neglected to put quotes around passages he lifted from Wikipedia? His major transgression was using Wikipedia as a source in the first place.
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