As revealed by Wikipedia and reported by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin:
Sleuthing Wikipedia editors have found several cases of apparent plagiarism over the past two years by Tim Ryan, a reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. It began with the discovery of an article last month containing language that closely matched a Wikipedia article, and more investigation found earlier articles that seemed to borrow from additional sources without attribution.
In response to these reports, the Star-Bulletin acknowledged the situation by adding corrections or editor’s notes to some of the articles. Star-Bulletin Editor Frank Bridgewater took these actions after investigating the incident and also met with the newspaper’s publisher, Dennis Francis, about the situation. However, Bridgewater said last week that he considered the issue of whether any action would be taken against Ryan “a confidential personnel matter.”
I’m an architecture major, and for one of our classes we were studying the architecture and history of Paris. Our instructor gave us notes that he “wrote” about Paris. Well, I wanted to find out what a term in the notes meant. I typed it in to Google, and it came up with the Wikipedia article. I start reading the article, and it’s almost exactly the same as the notes we were given. I didn’t think to do anything at the time, but when we were given an opportunity to evaluate the course at the end of the semester, I mentioned this incident. The school has pretty strict policies about plagarism, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the intsructor isn’t asked to teach here again.
I didn’t play $1200 to read an article freely available on the internet.
Well, I don’t pay money so that professors can stand on a soapbox and rant about things unrelated to the subject they are supposed to be teaching, but they do that quite often too.