Chris Anderson v. Wikipedia: Takes 'Free' to Heart, Plagiarizes

Videos

Chris Anderson on Michael Pollan

see larger video

sourced by Amy Judd

It's nice when book authors believe their own convictions, but Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, may have taken his words a bit too much to heart in his new book Free, in which he was caught having plagiarized Wikipedia, the online collaborative encyclopedia.

I know Wikipedia is free, but even that seems going slightly too far to prove a point. Seeing as irony is a free commodity, based on Anderson's theory someone is going to make a ton of money off this one.

The plagiarism was discovered by Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) upon reviewing Anderson's book, fully titled Free: The Future of a Radical Price: The Economics of Abundance and Why Zero Pricing Is Changing the Face of Business. VQR found numerous passages that seemed to be copied verbatim from various Wikipedia entries, with no citations.

To give him his due, Anderson came clean after being called out, apologizing and setting rectification of the situation in motion as soon as the issue was raised and became public. The publisher of Free, Hyperion, released a statement saying, "We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson's response...and we are working...to correct these errors."

But what was his reason for letting this "unfortunate mistake" occur?

Thank you, Chris. You have single-handedly justified the poor state of bibliographies submitted by millions of schoolchildren each year. Hear that, kids? Don't worry if MLA says one comma and Chicago says none; if it's too confusing, you can just skip the citation altogether!

But actually, says Anderson, the plagiarism wasn't as bad as it seems.

So just take away alllllll that, and the passages are...still plagiarized.

Previously Anderson has written:

Well, thanks to his intrepid both-feet-in demonstration, now we know how.