Contributors to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, often referred to as Wikipedians, license their submitted content under a Creative Commons license, which permits re-use as long as attribution is given. However, there have been a number of occasions when persons have failed to give the necessary attribution and attempted to pass off material from Wikipedia as their own work. Such plagiarism is a violation of the Creative Commons license and, when discovered, can be a reason for embarrassment, professional sanctions, or legal issues.
In educational settings, students sometimes copy Wikipedia to fulfill class assignments. [1] A 2011 study by Turnitin found that Wikipedia was the most copied website by both secondary and higher education students. [2]
Many notable individuals and institutions have been credibly said to have committed plagiarism from Wikipedia.
Michel Houellebecq is a French author of novels, poems and essays, as well as an occasional actor, filmmaker and singer. His first book was a biographical essay on the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Houellebecq published his first novel, Whatever, in 1994. His next novel, Atomised, published in 1998, brought him international fame as well as controversy. Platform followed in 2001. He has published several books of poetry, including The Art of Struggle in 1996.
Frank Wynne is an Irish literary translator and writer.
Monica Elizabeth Crowley is the former Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs for the U.S. Department of the Treasury. She has been a political commentator and lobbyist. She was a Fox News contributor, where she worked from 1996 to 2017. She is a former online opinion editor for The Washington Times and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Park Jin-young, also known by his stage names J. Y. Park and The Asiansoul or the initials JYP, is a South Korean singer-songwriter, record producer, record executive, and reality television show judge. Park rose to stardom as a singer following the release of his 1994 debut album, Blue City. In 1997, he became the founder of JYP Entertainment, one of the most profitable entertainment agencies in South Korea.
Plagiarism is the representation of another person's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one's own original work. Although precise definitions vary depending on the institution, in many countries and cultures plagiarism is considered a violation of academic integrity and journalistic ethics, as well as of social norms around learning, teaching, research, fairness, respect, and responsibility. As such, a person or entity that is determined to have committed plagiarism is often subject to various punishments or sanctions, such as suspension, expulsion from school or work, fines, imprisonment, and other penalties.
Jill Bialosky is an American poet, novelist, essayist and executive book editor. She is the author of four volumes of poetry, three novels, and two recent memoirs. She co-edited with Helen Schulman an anthology, Wanting a Child. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, O Magazine, Real Simple, American Scholar, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and chosen for Best American Poetry, among others.
Christopher M. Spence is a retired former Canadian educator, author, and former Canadian football player. He is the former Director of Education of the Toronto District School Board and former Director of Education of the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board.
Weiwei Zhang is a Chinese-Swedish author who writes under the pseudonym vivibear. Her stories include romance novels and time-traveling series for young adults, all published in Chinese. To date, all sixteen novels she wrote were believed to be found with various degrees of plagiarism, and the discovery was widely reported by Chinese media.
Cristian Gustavo Dzwonik, better known by his pseudonym Nik, is a cartoonist from Argentina, creator of Gaturro, and current cartoonist in the paper La Nación. He received the 2002 Konex Platinum Award for Best cartoonist, and four times the prize SIP. His works have been published throughout Latin America, the United States, Spain and France.
Neri Oxman is an Israeli-American designer and former professor known for art that combines design, biology, computing, and materials engineering. She coined the phrase "material ecology" to define her work.
The Map and the Territory is a novel by French author Michel Houellebecq. The narrative revolves around a successful artist, and involves a fictional murder of Houellebecq. It was published on 4 September 2010 by Flammarion and received the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious French literary prize, in 2010. The title is a reference to the map–territory relation.
Kindle Direct Publishing is Amazon.com's e-book publishing platform launched in November 2007, concurrently with the first Amazon Kindle device. Originally called Digital Text Platform, the platform allows authors and publishers to publish their books to the Amazon Kindle Store.
VroniPlag Wiki is a wiki started 28 March 2011 at Wikia that examines and documents the extent of plagiarism in German doctoral theses.
PlagTracker is a Ukrainian-based online plagiarism detection service that checks whether similar text content appears elsewhere on the web. It was launched in 2011 by Devellar.
Andrew Kaczynski is an American journalist and a political reporter for CNN. He became well known in 2011 by posting old video clips of politicians, often of them making statements contrary to their current political positions, to YouTube. He was described as "the [2012] Republican primaries' most influential amateur opposition researcher".
Lin Chih-chien is a Taiwanese politician. He was the mayor of Hsinchu City from 25 December 2014 to 8 July 2022.
What the (Bleep) Just Happened?: The Happy Warrior's Guide to the Great American Comeback is a 2012 book by Fox News contributor Monica Crowley. It was published by Broadside Books, a HarperCollins imprint.
Yasmín Esquivel Mossa is a Mexican lawyer and public official who serves as a justice of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation since 2019. Since then, she has served in positions such as account secretary of the presidency of the Superior Agrarian Court or magistrate and president of the Superior Chamber of the Court of Administrative Litigation.
Austrian professor [ Stefan Weber] alleged that one particular mention of New York City's Midtown Community Court in the book pertains to its use of language and structure that closely mirrors a Wikipedia article, indicating a lack of proper citation and paraphrasing.
An IB examiner who spoke to The TES said they were "shocked" to discover there were "serious examples of academic dishonesty", throughout the document with guides for 14 of the 24 questions containing large sections copied wholesale from unattributed websites, including Wikipedia. The TES has learned that the mark scheme is one of at least three being urgently investigated by the International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO) over plagiarism allegations as part of a "wide review" into the issue.
The Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency, which interfered in the 2016 election, is using different methods to hide itself better...Now Russian operators are trying to avoid detection by copying and pasting chunks of texts from other sources directly into their posts. When Facebook took down 50 accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency in October [2019], many of the posts featured text copied from Wikipedia.
After the 580-page manuscript was finally submitted by Jean McCorquodale last January, the Mercury News found that many excerpts were allegedly copied word-for-word from the websites she was drawing her research from, including a section from the Wikipedia page for politician Jonathan D. Stevenson, a paragraph from a History Channel article about the Spanish-American War's Treaty of Paris and segments from another page on the Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation website.
The Daily Beast found more than a dozen instances in which Secret Empires, the bestselling book by investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, copied nearly complete sentences or sizable portions of them verbatim or near-verbatim from other sources. In a number of instances, those sources were uncited Wikipedia pages created before the book's publication in early 2018.