[Foundation-l] Allegations of Wikipedia plagurism by Brandt/Websites he has stirred up sending nasty notices

[Tomasz Wegrzanowski]

On 10/23/06, Jeff V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
>
> Mr. Brandt has posted a long listing of articles to his website making
> allegations of plagurism
> of wikipedia articles from copyrighted sources.
>
> http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/psamples.html
>
> Some editors may want to investigate these claims to determine if the
> articles were copied from
> (Wikipedia -> these sites) or the other way around (these sites ->
> Wikipedia).
>
> I did receive a notice on a couple of the articles I had uploaded to
> Wikigadugi from the XML dumps
> along with some comments about "looking into possible copyright
> infringement" from one of the sites
> Brandt references which brought this matter to my attention in the first
> place.  Someone should probably
> go over these articles and determine if these claims have merit.
>
> I am not going to take down anythig from Wikigadugi right now since I am
> unable to determine if the
> articles were copied FROM Wikipedia or the other way around.

Brandt is nothing more than a troll.

Any genuine anti-plagiarism bot would at least look
at article histories whether the allegedly "plagiarized" part
was added at once (possible plagiarism) or build step by
step (definitely plagiarism the other way). The trollbot
doesn't do that because it's not interested in truth, just
in building an impresive list of mostly false cases to
attract attention.

Just one example (the very first I looked at):
* http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/plagiarism/0233.html
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henryk_Sienkiewicz

The trollbot might have found some actual plagiarism
by chance (with so many cases it isn't completely
unlikely that at least one is genuine), but most of them
are certainly fakes, so I suggest completely ignoring
the troll and the trollbot.

-- 
Tomasz Wegrzanowski [ http://t-a-w.blogspot.com/ ]