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Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

cdixon.org

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Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

#51

Post by contrarian »

darxius wrote: post #50

This happened to me too. I posted an article on my blog and it got on HN's front page. It was about how people have to stop sending .doc files as attachments via email and to use something like .pdf instead. (my article is here: http://maxmackie.github.com/2012/03/19/Stop-distributing-.do... ) A couple days later, this guy wrote about the same exact thing, bringing up the same exact arguments as I did (his link: http…

Actually he presented this at a conference in Edinburgh called FLOSSUK a while before he wrote the article, and since he's one of the people who was involved in making OpenOffice happen he probably knew about it a long time before you did :-) These things happen,

Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

#53

Post by webmink »

darxius wrote: post #50

This happened to me too. I posted an article on my blog and it got on HN's front page. It was about how people have to stop sending .doc files as attachments via email and to use something like .pdf instead. (my article is here: http://maxmackie.github.com/2012/03/19/Stop-distributing-.do... ) A couple days later, this guy wrote about the same exact thing, bringing up the same exact arguments as I did (his link: http…

I wrote the article you're complaining about, which is actually mainly about making hybrid PDFs. I did not see your article, let alone copy it; I would have linked to it if I had. I have been working on that piece for a few months off-and-on and pitched it as a "lightning talk" at FLOSS UK Spring 2012 in Edinburgh beforehand.

More than that, I was a manager of the team that created the hybrid PDF feature in OpenOffice at Sun, and have been advocating avoiding editable attachments for years - the earliest I can find on my blog is http://www.webmink.net/2003/07/feature-creep.htm but I am pretty sure I was advocating it before.

The web is a big place where there are often people working on the same ideas as you (which is why software patents are a travesty), and I recommend avoiding accusing people of incompetence without a little more research.

Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

#54

Post by swang »

leviathant wrote: post #49
swang wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your friend (or you, not sure if you mean your friend is complaining) understands that once he writes content into a Wikipedia article he agrees to give away the contents of his work to the public right? That's the whole point of Wikipedia. Your friend doesn't deserve credit, Wikipedia does.

Of course he does. I think it would be quite a task to bring a Wikipedia Article up to "featured article" status and not understand such a basic fact about Wikipedia. I suppose my inclusion of that bit was more about the oddity of seeing things you wrote, copied verbatim into hundreds of magazines, newspapers, and online articles. I think that when we discussed this, his point was also that Wikipedia was not credited…

Want to apologize for that last sentence since I wrote it after feeling sick in the middle of the night. After I reread it when I woke up it sounded pretty rude.

Not that he should or shouldn't deserve credit for editing but in the end Wikipedia should be the one cited. I would suggest that Wikipedia acknowledge some editors for their work but that to me would probably result in more bureaucracy and infighting than any good it would do acknowledging contributing editors.

But I agree, very sad when a big site doesn't cite their sources even if it was, "an email from a friend"

Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

#55

Post by azernik »

Lockyy wrote: post #45
wladimir wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once Google indexes Borges' Library of Babel, though, you will find that any sentence is already used, and every article is already written. On a more serious note: it would be interesting to add a check to CMS systems to automatically look up all sentences in an article before submitting and apply information theory to compute a "plagiarism" coefficient. No doubt these kind of systems already exist to detect student…

Indeed, my university uses a service called Turnitin to rate the percentage of coursework that is plagiarised, along with giving where from etc. It's pretty nice actually, can recognise when things are quoted and not passed off as your own.

My high school actually used this too - my teacher once showed my a sample report, and it was actually very good at detecting plagiarism even with words changed, sentence order mildly munged, etc. (with percentage probabilities). They seem to have a fairly good model of what kind of changes writers make when copying material.

Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

#56

Post by batista »

nikcub wrote: post #39

I had a journalist rip off one of my posts without mentioning me as the source or even that I discovered the story. I found him on Twitter and sent him a message about it, and got no response. I dropped it because it happens so often. I ended up following him on Twitter. He later published another story that was a slight follow up to my own story and series of articles. This article of his got a lot of attention. In…

You should have screen-shoted the tweet, and send it along with your original story to some rival online outlet.

Journalists like exposing other such frauds...

Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

#57

Post by msredmond »

mcherm wrote: post #46
wladimir wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once Google indexes Borges' Library of Babel, though, you will find that any sentence is already used, and every article is already written. On a more serious note: it would be interesting to add a check to CMS systems to automatically look up all sentences in an article before submitting and apply information theory to compute a "plagiarism" coefficient. No doubt these kind of systems already exist to detect student…

Good point! Specifically, reputable journalistic outfits should implement a policy of running their materials through TurnItIn before publishing. This would allow editorial control over plagiarism. Any journalists want to comment on whether or not this is existing policy and why?

If you have to have your writers run their material through something to make sure they're not stealing it from somewhere else, shouldn't hire them in the first place. Really, most journalists would never do this.

Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

#58

Post by mcherm »

msredmond wrote: post #57
mcherm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point! Specifically, reputable journalistic outfits should implement a policy of running their materials through TurnItIn before publishing. This would allow editorial control over plagiarism. Any journalists want to comment on whether or not this is existing policy and why?

If you have to have your writers run their material through something to make sure they're not stealing it from somewhere else, shouldn't hire them in the first place. Really, most journalists would never do this.

We run our writer's material through spell checkers and grammar editing. We run it through fact checking processes. In theory, a good writer would never need any of these, but in the real world it is a useful step. If we do THESE things, then why not a step that requires nearly no effort (just use an automated tool) and which WOULD catch some cases that have affected even major publications with excellent reputations?
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