It is a very clever coverup of a very stupid crime.
The publisher's PR team was on this faster than you can say media disaster. Get "Oops, I goofed" out there as quickly as possible while shifting blame to someone or something else (software, confusion over citation format, whatever).
If this happened to one of Anderson's own writers at Wired, I suspect he or she would be out of a job just as quickly.
Note to tech bloggers: want a story that gets hits this week? Find an example of someone sacked from Wired for plagiarism and run a compare/contrast of their iniquity vs. this one.
You won't get free boot-stomping journalism, but you can get free analysis (see DeLong, Yglesias, Instapundit, Duncan Black, McArdle, Archpundit, I could go on).
Example: there's someone out there who can explain why Daley flopped on the Olympic guarantee - did he want to? Pretty clearly no. Did he have to? Pretty clearly yes. But, instead, we get more of the same "oh, that Daley, he shits on the city".
The issue is - will people work for free for someone else? As far as I can tell, the only community doing that online is at DailyKos. Am I wrong?
College Humor, Cracked, JPGMag. It's all about the incentives. The Citizen's just not there yet. The big shift from blogging to aggregation around new year's was in part prompted by me sending 3 writers to Grant Park on election night and having none of them send back stories "because it was crowded." As they were "citizen journalists" I had no leverage or way to hold them accountable. In retrospect this seems obvious, but it was a wakeup call. Can't run a business on volunteer writing, gotta get some central thing running consistently and without fail, i.e. the aggregator.
Except that "crime" and "plagiarism" imply (to my mind) an intent to deceive, or at least acting consciously. That doesn't strike me as very likely. It would mean that Anderson is an idiot in at least two ways: thinking he wouldn't get caught ripping stuff off Wikipedia, and taking a big risk for trivial gain.
The publisher's PR team was on this faster than you can say media disaster. Get "Oops, I goofed" out there as quickly as possible while shifting blame to someone or something else (software, confusion over citation format, whatever).
If this happened to one of Anderson's own writers at Wired, I suspect he or she would be out of a job just as quickly.