DCP's ongoing problem with plagiarism

[_Stocks]

Fascinating!

Of course, when one spends upwards of 3 hours a day blogging and commenting (instead of more important work) one might be tempted to pad the relevance of these activities by giving off the appearance of being a polymath. One might be tempted, in an effort to sustain that charade, to cut a few corners by filling in facts and minutae gleaned from an open source repository such as Wikipedia.

Ironically, nearly every article at Wikipedia was authored anonymously!

So not only does DCP now support the anonymous bloggers at NNL, he also seems to tacitly support the thousands of anonymous posters at Wikipedia.

Louis should be irate!

[_moksha]

Lesson? If you plagiarize from Wikipedia, their mistakes become your mistakes.

Can you prove that the Lord did not give Dr. Peterson special dispensation to quote Wikipedia as liberally as he wishes?

[_Lemmie]

Lesson? If you plagiarize from Wikipedia, their mistakes become your mistakes.

Can you prove that the Lord did not give Dr. Peterson special dispensation to quote Wikipedia as liberally as he wishes?

Did you see any quotation marks?

[_Lemmie]

Incidentally, I would feel deeply ungrateful if I didn’t publicly thank the small cadre of obsessive critics who spend so much of their lives seeking to find errors in blog entries that I post. I know that they read my blog with meticulous care, compiling lists of my turns of phrase, checking my facts, amassing estimates of the time I spend on blogging, performing basic quantitative analysis on their estimates, and so forth.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... place.html

You'll notice that buried in the list is "checking my facts," the new loan-shifted DP euphemism for "plagiarism." Also known as dragging BYU's Honor Code through the mud by a current BYU faculty member.

The entry in question corrects the Wikipedia error Peterson plagiarized, and now contains this P.S.:

P. S. The information above is publicly available and comes from online sources and from displays in the Earthquake Lake Visitors Center. I do not claim to have drawn it from my own seismological researches and archival study. I simply visited the site, found the event interesting, and thought that I would share something about it with readers who may not have been to the place within the past few hours.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... ntana.html

Regarding Peterson's misconception that "publicly available" and "comes from online sources" somehow means "I can use it without quotation marks and without saying who wrote it":

Villanova University General Counsel -- "Plagiarism vs. Public Domain"

...Proper attribution should still be given to authors of public domain works even though public domain works may be used without permission. It is important to note that the mere appearance of a work on a website does not necessarily indicate that the work is in the public domain or that permission has been granted to use the work other than for individual use.

https://www1.villanova.edu/villanova/ge ... arism.html

[Guest]

There is no way DP copied this from Wikipedia's page. The wording is totally different.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... ntana.html

The wiki article from which Peterson plagiarized, using "totally [NON]- different" wording, is titled 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake. It has 15 different references on the title page, with footnotes used copiously throughout to give credit for the information.

Here are the parts DP directly plagiarized, with their wiki counterparts posted first:

The 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake[3] (also known as the 1959 Yellowstone earthquake[3]) occurred on August 17[3] at 11:37 pm (MST)[4] in southwestern Montana, United States. The earthquake measured 7.2 on the Moment magnitude scale[1], ....

The Hebgen Lake earthquake (also known as the Yellowstone earthquake) occurred  at 11:37 PM, local time, on 17 August 1959.  Measuring 7.2 on the Moment magnitude scale

the 1959 earthquake is comparable to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake as one of the strongest earthquakes in North America,[5] behind the 1964 magnitude 9.2 Good Friday earthquake in Alaska.

— which ranks it roughly on par with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake as one of the most powerful quakes ever recorded in North America, behind the 1964 Good Friday earthquake in Alaska, which came in at a stunning 9.2 —

This part contains the error originally posted, re the 50 million, which he has now corrected to 80million:

The landslides caused by the quake carried 50 million cubic yards (38 million cubic metres) of rock, mud and debris down into the valley and created hurricane-force winds strong enough to toss cars.

Fifty million cubic yards (38 million cubic metres) of rock, mud, and debris swept down into the narrow valley of the Madison River at approximately 100 miles per hour, creating hurricane-force winds of roughly the same speed.  Those winds were strong enough, in their own right, to toss cars.

The landslide blocked the flow of the Madison River, [7] resulting in the creation of Quake Lake

 The slide blocked the flow of the Madison River, resulting in the creation of Earthquake Lake.

US$11 million (equivalent to $94.54 million in 2018) in damage was caused.[7]

The Hebgen Lake temblor caused eleven million dollars in damage (equivalent, in current values, to nearly 100 million dollars, which is remarkable for an area so remote and sparsely populated).

Facts are one thing, but the language, the concepts such as the comparison to equivalent dollars, tossing cars, other earthquakes, etc. and especially THE ERROR are concepts this wiki article footnoted and provided references for (including the error, although the error is not repeated on other wiki pages about the event).

[_Lemmie]

And one last thing.

P. S. The information above is publicly available and comes from online sources and from displays in the Earthquake Lake Visitors Center.

From the Earthquake Visitors Center site:

Privacy Policy

This website is provided as a public service by the USDA Forest Service. Information presented on this website is considered public information and may be distributed or copied unless otherwise indicated.

Use of appropriate byline/photo/image credit is requested.


https://www.fs.fed.us/privacy.shtml

I'm sure Peterson will add the appropriate byline soon, although a lot of the information in the wiki article, including the error, are NOT on the visitors center site, so he might have to do another re-write, if he wants to still argue his information came from there.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

What it must feel like to lie with impunity, and have some sycophant show up and give his testimony that he KNOWS you're not lying. No wonder Mr. Peterson has gotten away with plagiarizing his material since at LEAST the 1990's. He knows there are no consequences for doing so.

Amazing.

- Doc

[_Lemmie]

Another edit. New part added by DP is bolded:

P. S.  The information above is pretty generic and publicly available and comes from online sources and from having just looked at displays in the Earthquake Lake Visitors Center.  

What a coincidence that one can just look at displays, and manage to replicate an online Wikipedia entry, complete with the EXACT Wikipedia error that is NOT repeated in the Visitors Center site.

And generic data? Date, time, scale, okay. Comparing it to the exact same two other earthquakes, described in exactly the same colloquial wording, comparing the dollar value loss to today's dollars, describing wind speed as car-tossing, etc. etc., over and over and over, all add up to no.

The most obvious, though, is the error. That is a Wikipedia error that DP repeated word for word, but that error is NOT on the visitors center site. In fact, the correct statement (80 million tons) is literally in the second sentence on the main site.

50 million cubic yards (38 million cubic metres) of rock, mud and debris

Fifty million cubic yards (38 million cubic metres) of rock, mud, and debris

over 80 million tons of rock

[_fetchface]

The cool thing about citing your sources is that when they turn out to be wrong, you don't look like an idiot. You just look like someone who quotes sources and one of them happened to be wrong.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

The cool thing about citing your sources is that when they turn out to be wrong, you don't look like an idiot. You just look like someone who quotes sources and one of them happened to be wrong.

What do you look like when you keep doubling down hoping your audience doesn't notice or care?

- Doc