Theft & Lies
I’m all for free content, who wouldn’t be? But, when you can’t trust what you read what’s the point of reading it at all?
Change perspective, imagine you’re the contributor. What if you spend hours researching and writing a piece of content only to have it plagiarised, and what’s more, to have it copied incorrectly?
Last month the prestigious journal, Nature claimed that Wikipedia offered content that was, by far, more accurate than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Their report was fundamentally flawed and quite frankly, I was horrified to the extent that Nature had lied about what they had published.
Read the original BCC news story. Read what Britannica and Nature had to say.
Now for the theft part of this clip: I’m (Matt) teaching myself how to play guitar. I use a number of sites for reference. One of which is Ultimate Guitar. It’s a great site, loads of music (tabs) and tutorials for free.
However, after trying for hours to get my guitar to make a noise similar to that of a Blood Hound Gang song, I learned that the tutorial I was reading had actually been plagiarised by the Ultimate Guitar’s contributor. It was stolen from another guitar website, Ape Guitar. When I went to the source of the tutorial, Ape Guitar, I was able to spot the mistake I had been making.
Now that publishing to the Internet is almost as cheap and restriction free as preaching in the middle of the town square we (readers and writers) have to keep an eye open to the pitfalls of free and contributed content.
