I see 16 cited cases of supposed plagiarism. How did we go from 16 cases to claiming 85% of people in a 1700 student class are plagiarizing? No offense to the submitter, but I feel these kinds of things are best submitted after someone reasonably objective distills and summarizes the issue. Devoted wikipedia editors can be somewhat dramatic about things, so in cases like this I prefer to see other points of view.
Right, this thread should just be deleted until someone writes a story about it. The page is unreadable--like most of Wikipedia's talk pages...and then they wonder why normal people don't participate.
You make it sound like 'normal' people discuss things in a calm manner and are never affected by things like tunnel vision, irrationality, or ignoring the other person while waiting for your turn to speak.
Scanning the cited examples of plagiarism suggests that some of the alleged "unreasonably close paraphrasing" wasn't actually that close, the text insertions were generally short and referenced, and the 85% stat wasn't reflected in the assessments other editors (who picked up other issues) made of other students' work. Are they any worse than the average edits introduced by other novice editors which don't get such forensic scrutiny? Probably not.
If you'd prefer the world's most popular anonymously-editable website to be a carefully-curated collection of articles written largely by experienced editors (which a lot of the experienced editors evidently do) then you'd wouldn't want this class anywhere near it. But I think Wikipedia has bigger problems to fix.
It stretches credulity to suggest it's akin to vandalism.
That came from Mike Christie. Information was included in the user_talk page where he says 16 out of 19 students plagiarized. That works out to about 84% of known editors from that class.
Hundreds of students made edits. 16 are accused of plagarism. Which is laughable because this accusation is based on the citation provided by the student's own edit.
The only thing these students are guilty of is bad citation form.
Here's the editor's analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Colin/Introduction_to_Psyc...
I see 16 cited cases of supposed plagiarism. How did we go from 16 cases to claiming 85% of people in a 1700 student class are plagiarizing? No offense to the submitter, but I feel these kinds of things are best submitted after someone reasonably objective distills and summarizes the issue. Devoted wikipedia editors can be somewhat dramatic about things, so in cases like this I prefer to see other points of view.