Wikipedia and Jacqueline Gonzalez
MySA.com: Metro |Express-News staffer resigns after plagiarism in column is discovered Web
A San Antonio Express-News newsroom employee resigned Tuesday after admitting she used, without attribution, information from a Web site for a Christmas Day column. Later research uncovered further examples of plagiarism in two other columns.The initial investigation found information, taken from Wikipedia, a free Internet encyclopedia, was published in the Watchdog column on Page 2B of the Metro section Dec. 25. The information that was not attributed concerned the origin of Dec. 25 as the birth date of Jesus Christ.
Jacqueline Gonzalez, the Watchdog columnist and administrative assistant to Express-News Editor Robert Rivard, resigned Tuesday after admitting the judgment error Friday.
Eek! I use wikipedia from time to time too but I am a blog writer not a newpaper reporter and even I put it in quotes with a link to a source. I am sure it occured to her that she was supposed to do that also. The sad thing about her resigning is that if she had quoted her source she would still have her job. I can’t even imagine why she would want to take credit for wikipedia’s words. When I write something I like to know I wrote it, I don’t mind using sources (that is for sure) but I sure don’t want to take credit for someone else’s work. I hope this puts all the Express News writers on notice because I have seen quite a few articles that are mighty similar to blog posts I saw before the piece came out without sources given. I haven’t seen it verbatim yet but I do try to watch pretty closely. Bloggers know they read us, we can see it on our site stats and I personally would be over the moon if they quoted me but I don’t want to see my words in print with someone else’s name attributed to them.
Wikipedia is written by contribitors. It is users who write the definitions and while I have never contributed one the people who do don’t seem to take the job lightly. If it can take me hours to write a blog post I can’t imagine the amount of time it takes to write some of those huge wikipedia entries.
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