Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-05-17/In the news

Deputy presents law project to increase sanctions against plagiarism, copy-pasted from Wikipedia without attribution
On 6 May, Argentine Deputy Gerónimo Vargas Aignasse presented a law project to increase sanctions against those who commit plagiarism. But in the project proposal, to define plagiarism, he copied 331 words from the Spanish Wikipedia article on the topic (es:plagio), without any kind of attribution. The copy-pasted text even includes square brackets from the (only partially removed) footnotes in the Wikipedia article.

It wasn't the first time that Aignasse copied text from Wikipedia into law proposals. In a proposal to prohibit barra bravas from travelling to South Africa for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, he copied 314 words from the corresponding article.

A week later the Deputy admitted in an interview with Clarín that he copied the text from Wikipedia, and that he had done it before. Nevertheless, he argued that he had no obligation to cite the source, which could be considered ironic given the fact that the Deputy's law proposal seeks, precisely, to punish those who don't cite sources.

The incident was reported in English by Techdirt.


 * References
 * "Presentó un proyecto contra el plagio, plagiando a Wikipedia" by María Arce, Clarín, 16 May 2010, page 18

Briefly

 * A front-page article in the Sunday Jerusalem Post by Haviv Rettig casts a critical eye on pro-Palestinian editors rewriting history on the English and Hebrew Wikipedias.