As I've noted for many years, there is a website that checks school essays for plagiarism called Turnitin. And exactly seven years ago, Turnitin ran a study of the uses their service. And discovered that Wikipedia was the #1 source for plagiarized text with both secondary and college students. The original report appears to have been removed from Turnitin's website. For what reason, dunno. There is a copy here.
And I also discovered, Wikipedia insiders absolutely hate Turnitin. So much, that:
Their Wikipedia article was first created in 2005. And tremendously expanded from January 2006 until 2009 by a number of accounts: Cutter20 (T-C-F-R-B) who did little on Wikipedia other than the Turnitin article, plus working journalist and administrator Daniel Case (T-C-F-R-B) (who was clearly working with Cutter20). Thence it was edited by a litany of IP addresses. It swiftly expanded to more than 15k bytes by late 2007, most of it highly critical of the company's Turnitin plagiarism service. Every possible media source of a negative nature was dug up and added.
Later editors included obvious SPA Wikibarber (T-C-F-R-B), an IP address in Pakistan with possible links to a "diploma mill", a likely Turnitin paid editor called "Plagiarismdetection", and a continuing mishmash of other IP addresses and editing addicts. In 2008 a higher-education professional named ElKevbo (T-C-F-R-B) tried to make the article more neutral; his changes were later reverted. From 2009 to the present day, patroller Tedickey (T-C-F-R-B) has been watching the article with great care and quickly reverting any changes. A brief editwar in May/June 2015 concerned the section "Copyright infringement in countries where fair use does not exist", which was almost entirely about Italian law in this area; it was repeatedly removed by Tedickey.
Since Turnitin has repeatedly pointed at Wikipedia as the most popular source of school-paper plagiarized material, this article appears to act as a "revenge" attempt. Daniel Case's deep involvement in the early history of the article does not bode well for its "neutrality".
Evidently insiders were aware they had a problem. As a result of iParadigms trying to "cooperate" with the Wikipedia "community", in March 2012 a special policy page was created on Wikipedia, WP:Turnitin. Ironically, it was created by administrator and Wikiproject Medicine principal Jake Orlowitz. He received some support from fellow medicine editor Dr. James Heilman, but as of 2015 there is little evidence any serious action was taken by the insider community or the WMF. The timeline ends in August 2012, with subsequent proposed actions left "pending".
Turnitin later "teamed up" with the Wikimedia Foundation....just one of those little things you guys missed that Ocaasi and Heilman did to "make Wikipedia a happy place". And to neutralize their public-relations problems. Teachers also use WP for checking facts; they shouldn't, but they do, because the damn thing is sitting in front of them and difficult to avoid now. Everyone Googles, and Google points them to Wikipedia content.
In their words, their students increasingly “equate research with Googling,” and use search engines in lieu of more traditional sources without sufficient ability to judge the quality of information they find online.
In a similar vein, AP and NWP teachers use the online encyclopedia tool Wikipedia at much higher rates than U.S. adult internet users as a whole (87% vs. 53%). Wikipedia relies on user-generated, crowd-sourced content, a process that sometimes calls into question the accuracy of its information. In focus groups with teachers and students prior to the survey, Wikipedia was often noted as a tool teachers discourage or bar students from using because of concerns about the reliability of its content.
Found on the front page of Reddit today:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnethicalLifeP ... translate/
Top voted comment:
Turnitin is the real question
