Plagiarism op-ed in PW

Siva Vaidhyanathan wrote an interesting editorial in the June 29th Publisher's Weekly about accusations of plagiarism surrounding Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson.

While preparing a review of Anderson's latest book last month, Virginia Quarterly Review book blogger Waldo Jaquith discovered several passages in the book that appeared to have been lifted directly from Wikipedia without a citation of the source. Anderson acknowledged the error and attributed it to rushing through the last edit to remove citations at the request of his publisher.

Vaidhyanathan's focus in the piece is less on the plagiarism (which usually isn't really a copyright issue, but rather an issue of intellectual honesty) and more on the troubling trend of publishers urging authors to not include citations in nonfiction works. Sort of off topic for this blog, but interesting nonetheless.

Oh, and I'd better cite the heck out of it:

Vaidhyanathan, S (2009).Anderson's Wiki-versy. Publisher's Weekly, 256(26), 132.

For all you students out there, check out this website called Son of Citation Machine, which I used to cite the article. You just fill in information about your source and out comes a paper-ready MLA or APA-formatted citation. Laziness is no longer a valid excuse for omitting source citations.