Just days after Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson acknowledged that he included passages without attribution from free online resource Wikipedia for his upcoming book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, the author said the omissions have been corrected. “We've fixed the digital editions before publication,” Anderson wrote on his personal blog, adding that the book's full notes will also be published online “as they should have been to begin with.”
In a separate statement, Anderson's publisher, Hyperion, said the passages in question will also be fixed in all future editions of the print book.
With the errors corrected before publication, the mission now turns to damage control. Although Anderson apologized for his errors and attempted to explain how he came to include unattributed passages in the book, that explanation has drawn a mostly blistering response from bloggers and other commentators. On the Virginia Quarterly Review blog, which broke the story, commentators have reacted angrily to what they called Anderson's blatant plagiarism [see this week's Soapbox, p. 132].
Book blogger Edward Champion blasted Anderson for “a troubling habit of mentioning a book or an author and using this as an excuse to reproduce the content with very few changes.” Some seemed most disappointed by Anderson's use of Wikipedia at all, a reference work that has been criticized for its sometimes dubious credibility. Others, however, shrugged off the incident as a byproduct of the cut and paste digital age. “Copying isn't what it used to be,” one comment read. “[Anderson] definitely should have acknowledged the sources, but lifting words means nothing to me now. If Anderson stole the idea or nucleus for his work, that's a different story.”
Anderson's unattributed use of Wikipedia in his book made national headlines last week after writer Waldo Jaquith, who was preparing to review Free for the Virginia Quarterly Review, found a passage that reminded him of a Wikipedia entry. In all, Jaquith uncovered and detailed for readers nearly a dozen unattributed passages in Anderson's work.
“This is entirely my own screwup,” Anderson acknowledged. “In my drafts, I had intended to block-quote Wikipedia passages, footnoting their URL,” he explained. “But my publisher, like many others, was uncomfortable with the changing nature of Wikipedia, and wanted me to time-stamp each URL... which struck me as clumsy and archaic. So at the 11th hour we decided to kill the notes and footnotes entirely, and I integrated the attributions into the copy.... Obviously, in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad.” The passages, Anderson added, were “marginal” to the book's thesis.
In a subsequent comment in VQR Jaquith said that he did not find any evidence that Anderson acted with malice or that “Anderson's thesis” contained any plagiarized ideas. “All ideas that form the core of the book are credited, and his own thesis that he builds upon showed no signs of being anybody's but his own.”
Anderson's book, the subject of a May 18 PW interview, “Rip My Book, Please,” is set to be published in early July.
