Contributors to the online encyclopedia

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

license their submitted content under a

Creative Commons license A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyric ...

, which permits re-use as long as attribution is given. However, there have been a number of occasions when persons have failed to give the necessary attribution and attempted to pass off material from Wikipedia as their own work. Such plagiarism is a violation of the Creative Commons license and, when discovered, can be a reason for embarrassment, professional sanctions, or legal issues. In educational settings, students sometimes copy Wikipedia to fulfill class assignments. A 2011 study by

Turnitin Turnitin (stylized as turnitin) is an Internet-based plagiarism detection service run by the American company Turnitin, LLC, a subsidiary of Advance Publications. Founded in 1998, it sells its licenses to universities and high schools who then ...

found that Wikipedia was the most copied website by both secondary and

higher education Higher education is tertiary education leading to award of an academic degree. Higher education, also called post-secondary education, third-level or tertiary education, is an optional final stage of formal learning that occurs after comple ...

students.

Notable instances

Many notable individuals and institutions have been credibly said to have committed plagiarism from Wikipedia. *

Chris Anderson (writer) Chris Anderson (born July 9, 1961) is an English-American author and entrepreneur. He was with ''The Economist'' for seven years before joining ''Wired'' magazine in 2001, where he was the editor-in-chief until 2012. He is known for his 2004 a ...

* Jill Bialosky *

Monica Crowley Monica Elizabeth Crowley (born September 19, 1968) was the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs for the U.S. Department of the Treasury. She has been a political commentator and lobbyist. She was a Fox News contributor, where she worked (with ...

* Five Star Movement (Italian political party) *

Jane Goodall Dame Jane Morris Goodall (; born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall on 3 April 1934), formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is an English primatologist and anthropologist. Seen as the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best kn ...

Michel Houellebecq Michel Houellebecq (; born Michel Thomas, 26 February 1956 or 1958) is a French author, known for his novels, poems and essays, as well as an occasional actor, filmmaker and singer. His first book was a biographical essay on the horror writer ...

International Baccalaureate Organisation The International Baccalaureate (IB), formerly known as the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO), is a nonprofit foundation headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, and founded in 1968. It offers four educational programmes: the IB D ...

(IBO) was accused of copying IB test questions from Wikipedia *

Internet Research Agency The Internet Research Agency (IRA; russian: Агентство интернет-исследований, translit=Agentstvo internet-issledovaniy), also known as ''Glavset'' (russian: link=no, Главсеть) and known in Russian Internet sla ...

* Benny Johnson (journalist) *

Siniša Mali Siniša Mali ( sr-Cyrl, Синиша Мали, ; born 25 August 1972) is a Serbian economist and politician serving as deputy prime minister of Serbia since 2022 and as minister of finance since 2018. A member of the Serbian Progressive Party ( ...

, Serbian Finance Minister, who was found by the

University of Belgrade The University of Belgrade ( sr, / ) is a public university in Serbia. It is the oldest and largest modern university in Serbia. Founded in 1808 as the Belgrade Higher School in revolutionary Serbia, by 1838 it merged with the Kragujevac-ba ...

to have plagiarized his Ph.D. thesis * John McCain *

Yana Milev Yana Milev is a German cultural theorist, sociologist, ethnographer, and curator. Life Yana Milev was born in Leipzig, East Germany, the first child of the Bulgarian physician and anthropologist Gancho Milev, who had immigrated to the GDR in t ...

* Okayama Prefectural Assembly *

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...

* Rand Paul *

The Pentagon The Pentagon is the headquarters building of the United States Department of Defense. It was constructed on an accelerated schedule during World War II. As a symbol of the U.S. military, the phrase ''The Pentagon'' is often used as a meton ...

* Peter Schweizer, in his 2018 book ''Secret Empires'' *

Government of the United Kingdom ga, Rialtas a Shoilse gd, Riaghaltas a Mhòrachd , image = HM Government logo.svg , image_size = 220px , image2 = Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom (HM Government).svg , image_size2 = 180px , caption = Royal Arms , date_es ...

, in its 2022 "Levelling Up" white paper. * Gerónimo Vargas Aignasse *

Fabiola Yáñez Fabiola Andrea Yáñez (born 14 July 1981) is an Argentine journalist and actress who is the current First Lady of Argentina. She has been the domestic partner of President Alberto Fernández since 2014. Early life and education Fabiola Andrea Y ...

Alejandro Zaera-Polo Alejandro Zaera Polo is a Spanish architect, theorist and founder of Alejandro Zaera-Polo & Maider Llaguno Architecture (AZPML). He was formerly dean of the Princeton University School of Architecture and of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. ...

Santa Clara County Santa Clara County, officially the County of Santa Clara, is the sixth-most populous county in the U.S. state of California, with a population of 1,936,259, as of the 2020 census. Santa Clara County and neighboring San Benito County together f ...

grantwriter *

Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as '' The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', ...

retracted a 2020 book for plagiarizing many large passages from Wikipedia.

References

{{Wikipedia

Notable instances

See also

References