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Wednesday, March 9, 2005

German Spiegel Copied Wikipedia

This is the scoop of the week in German blogosphere: Spiegel Online (arguably German’s biggest mainstream news source) copied long passages of an article from Wikipedia – without giving proper credit, but including the same comma errors as in the source. Compare an image of the Spiegel article with the Wikipedia page to see for yourself.

More details can be found in this German blog post; Spiegel Online in the meantime removed their article (which isn’t available in the Google Cache either, as they disallow caching), replacing it with an apology. Here’s my translation:

“We regret the error made by Spiegel Online

On this page, a text appeared which shouldn’t have appeared this way. It was giving background information on the ethnic atrocities which happened in Rwanda, and was largely made up of passages copied verbatim from Wikipedia – without crediting the source.

Of course this is completely opposing the Spiegel Online editorial guidelines. Text copied from other sources must always be clearly marked as such.

The Spiegel Online chief editors regret what happened. For the missing citation, we strongly apologize to the creators and authors of Wikipedia.”

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