

Houellebecq borrows from Wikipedia, never cites - drtse4
http://www.slate.com/id/2266737/

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zmmz
I like the tone of the article, it is not judgemental and very factual keeping
in sync with the subject matter (Houellebecq). Him copying wikipedia does not
surprise me at the least, as the article explains it's just the way he does
things - I especially like the part where he describes that he altered the
original entry just a little bit to suit his own style, somewhat echoing his
book _The Possibility of an Island_.

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jcl
I guess this is the literary equivalent of "sampling".

~~~
kmfrk
More or less, although literary sampling is hardly verbatim when it happens.
When we get a search engine for music, I'm sure a lot of artists will get
what's coming to them.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJPdVVOmbz4>.

Sometimes they secure the rights, sometimes they don't.

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akozak
On the one hand I think he should respect the CC BY-SA license and attribute
the source of the passages, but at the same time I wouldn't want to contribute
to copyright over-protectionism by arguing that he's violating copyright law
in not doing so.

In the end I think people should do the moral thing and attribute their
sources when they copy them wholesale (or more, when appropriate).

~~~
gwern
> I wouldn't want to contribute to copyright over-protectionism by arguing
> that he's violating copyright law in not doing so.

He is. He totally is. He is enclosing a public commons for his private gain.

In fact, asking only for citation is the absolute bare minimum that human
decency suggests; a reasonable reading of
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode> suggests that
legally his whole novel ought to be under CC-BY-SA. (Look at the linked
article: [http://www.slate.fr/story/26745/wikipedia-plagiat-michel-
hou...](http://www.slate.fr/story/26745/wikipedia-plagiat-michel-houellebecq-
carte-territoire) And this is only some of them.)

Personally, Houellebecq forfeited all my respect when he tried to cite Borges
as a predecessor in plagiarism. Borges is one of my favorite authors and I
have read everything he wrote time and again; Borges was _scrupulous_ about
his citation and quoting, as one would expect from a librarian.

~~~
pigbucket
Unless you're doing the Hyperion/Satyr contrast thing, putting Borges and
Houellebecq in the same context is always a problem, but:

1\. A cento is a poetical work wholly composed of verses or passages taken
from other authors; only disposed in a new form or order.

2\. The above statement is an example of plagiarism on my part, although I
cannot determine exactly who I'm plagiarizing. It appears in a few places.
Wikipedia stitches the sentence together with a list of examples that it takes
from another source, but it doesn't give any attribution for the actual
definition.

3\. One of Flamarrion's points (cited in the French slate) was precisely that
you cannot identify the author responsible for much of the text in Wiki.

4\. Citiing wikipedia as the source of something is like citing Dasani as the
source of your drinking water (which of course doesn't mean you shouldn't do
it).

5\. If you want another neat example look up French Wikipedia's discussion of
the Hoellebecq affair, which repeats in brief, without scrupulous attribution,
the basic argument of M. Glad's article, citing the latter only as the source
of the last sentence of its paragraph.

6\. I meant to just make the point about the Cento, but got a bit carried
away, so:

tl;dr: writers do this all the time and plagiarizing Wiki is like cheating on
Tiger Woods.

~~~
gwern
> 3\. One of Flamarrion's points (cited in the French slate) was precisely
> that you cannot identify the author responsible for much of the text in
> Wiki.

 _Huh?_ You can identify the author for Wikipedia text in greater and finer
detail than for pretty much any other text ever created, down to the character
and second. The name of the author may not be familiar to you, but it is a
name regardless; the name on the cover of a book isn't trustworthy either, and
Wikipedia is actually superior in that there is no 'Anonymous' (every
contribution is linked to a pseudonym or an IP address, the latter of which
can convey remarkable amounts of information).

I feel as if someone had come up to me and asked me, 'What if Shakespeare's
plays were not written by William Shakespeare but by another man of the same
name?'

Also, when Tiger Woods deletes 10k articles just to be _sure_ that the content
is clean from a copyright perspective
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_not...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents/CCI#Implementing_bot.3F)),
then you may peddle your specious analogies.

~~~
pigbucket
Your inordinately thoughtful response to a few glib comments merits a better
reply than this necessarily incomplete one. Intended to be constative, not
interrogative, those comments arouse in you nonetheless the doubtless
frustrating and noxious feeling of being asked a question both odd in the
extreme and tangential to the intended tenor of my remarks, but I'm happy to
take responsibility, and in case it weighs too heavily would add that if
Shakespeare's plays really were discovered to have been written not by the man
discussed in, among a thousand other places, an inspired, if not plagiarized,
article by Wikipedia, but by another man of the same name, then of more
interest and pertinence in the context of our discussion would not be what
would happen (to endless pages of biographical criticism, or to truckloads of
new grist for English doctoral mills, or to sad Stratford, or to inspired if
unplagiarized Wikipedia articles) but what would not happen: crucially, there
would be no change in the fact that the plays are full of plagiarized ideas,
arguments, words, phrases and sentences, nor in the fact that the plays have
in turn been plagiarized throughout the subsequent history of literature to
such an extent that Shakespeare's phrases have now become part of the
reservoir of everyday unattributed, if not plagiarized, cliches. It was surely
wrong of me to stress that plagiarism can rise even to the level of a genre
such as the Cento, when typically it is just the quotidian business of
literary writers brazenly to steal (should I acknowledge here also that this
claim might be taken to evoke Steve Jobs' invocation of Picasso's likely-
borrowed idea that great artists brazenly steal from others all the time and
that this is one of their defining traits?). And if I could muster, for the
sake of decorum as much as argument, the ability to take the whole question
seriously for a second, I would still be forced to say that Houellebecq's
plagiarism is traditional not anomalous, and its identification as a species
of theft would be downright banal even if trivially true, which fact M. Glad,
though responsible in the first place for raising the whole business to the
status of an "affair," has the good sense at least implicitly to acknowledge.
I would probably want to add, maintaining this unlikely seriousness, that
literary plagiarism has great literary value, that Shakespeare is better for
having stolen from Montaigne, and that Montaigne's ideas are themselves
enlivened, even improved, when uttered by Shakespearean characters whose
motivations are more clear, and whose claims are subject to refutation by the
deeds or words of other characters."I wake and feel the fell of night, not
day," to take another example that would appear arbitrary only to those who
don't know what I was up to last night, is a line with altogether different
meanings and effects in Ashbery's cento "The Dong with the Luminous Nose" from
its meanings and effects in the Hopkins poem from which it is lifted.

Now H. plagiarizes Wikipedia, and if I were a better person, more worthy of
mouthing moralizing pieties, more self-righteously sure of my own
unadulterated originality at every juncture, more appreciative at least of the
less than (as you point out) anonymous horde's unacknowledged (doubtless
original and impeccably documented, inspired if not plagiarized) explication
of the fly's reproductive activities, and if I agree at the same time that H.
is no Borges, just as Ashbery fails to breathe the rare and lofty poetic air
where Hopkins dwells, I still wouldn't give much of a fly's arse. All of
which, I hope, can be taken as grounds for forgiving the lack of energy and
honor I bring to the task of defending an obvious if throwaway and in good
part irrelevant claim that Wikipedia is full of plagiarism (I was silent on
whether it infringes copyright). But presumably no defense or citation is
needed for the weaker claim that the possibility of plagiarism, like the
possibility of vandalism, is a condition of the possibility of Wikipedia, and
is the obvious reason for what I am sure is its perpetual and heroic
vigilance, of which you cite an admirable instance. I still don't know what
exactly to infer from that 10k-page expurgation you mention, but here's an
apparently meaningful quotation from the discussion to which you were kind
enough to link: "As near as we can tell, everything this person [Darius] has
written that is longer than a few sentences is a copyvio. This means that the
well of articles he has created -- barring the ones that are simple lists of
data -- are, quite simply, poisoned foundations upon which we're letting
others build." On this evidence, it seems this was less a case of purging
pages "just to be sure," as you say, that there were no copyright violations,
than a case of purging because it looked like an egregious case. Your personal
reasons for thinking this was all merely precautionary and therefore,
apparently, if I read you correctly, evidence of a Wikipedia unsoiled by
silently borrowed thoughts, rather than a case of dealing with an extreme
example of a possibly pervasive problem, would be of some interest to me--
though I say that despite the fact that in general questions of whether
Wikipedia plagiarizes (seriously, is that a question? do we need to look for
examples?), or whether it is plagiarized, when measured against its undeniable
and immeasurable value are as trivial (to me) as the infidelities of a person
such as Woods when measured against his immeasurable talent. Finally, I cannot
restrain my imagination from wandering down the path that leads to the fantasy
of Mr. Woods frantically trying to shred ten thousand incriminating documents,
so in the case of our reaching the end of that improbable path, can I rely on
your being back in the market for my specious analogies, of which I have a
practically inexhaustible supply in dire need of peddling?

tl;dr? Leave out the adjectives and adverbs

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RyanMcGreal
Contrast Nick Hornby, who in his recent book _Juliet, Naked_ actually includes
a fictitious Wikipedia entry about one of the main characters.

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mruniverse
Can someone post Houellebecq's book on Wikipedia so I can see what we're
talking about?

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rubyrescue
wow i had no idea there were country-specific slates (slate.fr)... are there
any others? (slate.de doesn't work, nor slate.co.uk)

~~~
_delirium
Wikipedia only mentions the French version (apart from the original English
version), and says it was launched about a year ago. It seems it's sort of a
franchised version--- the Slate parent company only owns 15% of slate.fr.

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jemfinch
[citation needed]

