Chris Anderson’s ‘Free’ Contains Numerous Uncredited Passages From Wikipedia

Waldo Jaquith, at The Virginia Quarterly Review:

In the course of reading Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion, $26.99), for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources. These instances were identified after a cursory investigation, after I checked by hand several dozen suspect passages in the whole of the 274-page book.

Jaquith includes half a dozen incriminating examples. Plagiarism is a strong word, but there’s no other way to describe some of these passages.

Anderson has responded, acknowledging it as a “screwup”, on his Long Tail weblog.

★ Wednesday, 1 July 2009