I have fallen out of the habit of posting updates at the beginning and the end of the semesters. (Mostly because I’m not a student anymore, so I’m not taking new and exciting classes and posting the resulting term papers; instead, I’ve mostly been focused on the book.) Yet, perhaps it’s worthwhile to give it another go.

I’ve been speaking with a lot of people about Wikipedia, and two such interviews will be up by the end of the day.

• Bryan Crump on New Zealand Public Radio. I really enjoyed this one, Bryan was a great interviewer and I appreciated the non-rushed format (40 minutes!). (The audio files will only be available this week.)
• Natan Edelsburg, of NYU Steinhardt’s Communication Club. Natan asks about studying phenomena like Wikipedia from the perspective of a communication student at NYU.

On the academic front:

• I’m doing the job search again, and the market seems much quieter than last year, but hope abides.
• I am teaching Conflict Management and Media, Technology, and Society.
• I’ve been asked to give two talks this semester: one on Wikipedia as a Reliable Source of Health Information for Professor Ralph Katz’s honors seminar “Ethics, Pointillism, Epidemiology & Epistemology: Dueling with Health Science Information” and one on Wikipedia, Plagiarism, and Copyright for Fred Benenson’s “Copyright, Commerce, and Culture” course.

Finally, for those interested in the New York City free culture scene, James Vasile is running a Planet NYC aggregator.

Ported/Archived Responses

Kaldari on 2009-09-28

The issue of plagiarism by Wikipedia editors, especially non-copyright infringing plagiarism, has an interesting and contentious history on Wikipedia. While Wikipedia has had a policy on copyright violation since at least 2002, the guidelines on plagiarism were not established until earlier this year. I think one of the reasons Wikipedia has had a difficult time figuring out how to deal with plagiarism is that Wikipedia’s concept of authorship is unique and often confusing. There are numerous situations in which traditional ideas of plagiarism don’t make sense when applied to Wikipedia or are too simplistic. For example, when someone copies or translates material from one Wikimedia project to another, is that plagiarism? Another situation that commonly occurs are outside authors wanting to “plagiarize themselves” within Wikipedia. Obviously it’s not a simple issue to resolve. If you have any insights, feel free to bring them up at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Plagiarism

Joseph Reagle on 2009-09-29

Thanks again Kaldari. My work on WP and plagiarism needs to be updated a bit, so I will check out that link as I work on the presentation and a related paper – which has been under review since May.