[Wikimedia-l] Copy and paste

[James Heilman]

We really need a plagiarism detection tool so that we can make sure our
sources are not simply "copy and pastes" of older versions of Wikipedia.
Today I was happily improving our article on pneumonia as I have a day off.
I came across a recommendation that baby's should be suction at birth to
decrease their risk of pneumonia with a {{cn}} tag. So I went to Google
books and up came a book that supported it perfectly. And than I noticed
that this book supported the previous and next few sentences as well. It
also supported a number of other sections we had in the article but was
missing our references. The book was selling for $340 a copy. Our articles
have improved a great deal since 2007 and yet school are buying copy edited
version of Wikipedia from 5 years ago. The bit about suctioning babies at
birth is was wrong and I have corrected it. I think we need to get this
news out. Support Wikipedia and use the latest version online!

Further details / discuss are here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine#Can_we_still_use_books_as_refs.3F

-- 
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian

The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com