Taegan Goddard asks Did McCain Plagiarize His Speech on the Georgia Crisis?.
The passages noted in the post, especially the first two, would suggest rather convincingly that whomever it was that wrote that speech for McCain based a great deal of it on the Wikipedia entry on Georgia with a little bit of poor undergraduate-y word re-arrangement to try and make the new text “original.”
I will say that sans attribution, the examples given are enough for me to have given the speech a zero (and failure of my course) had it been a paper handed in to me (not to mention I take off a letter grade for every cited usage of Wikipedia in a research paper anyway).
The TG post also notes
Whether a presidential candidate should base policy speeches on material from Wikipedia is another question entirely.
No joke.
Update: To be clear, I don’t see this as some big “gotcha” on McCain, but almost certainly an example of sloppy, quick and dirty “research” by a speech writer or adviser (as noted in the comments). I don’t think that McCain himself was using the Google to get the info.
Update 2: Professsor Mark Kleiman does a pretty good job of how a prof would likely be to react to the speech in question if it was a paper turned in for a class.
It is a routine with which I am, sadly, quite familiar.
Update 3: Let me plainly state that regardless of anything else, and as noted above, it is almost certainly incorrect to state “McCain plagiarized” (which is how the story is playing in the Blogosphere) as there is no way McCain would have sat down and researched and written the speech (nor would have any modern politician).
Honestly, what bothers me about this whole situation, such as it is, (and it isn’t as though it kept me up last night in worry) is that any speech writer for any major candidate would consult Wikipedia for background information. It bespeaks of laziness as well as a lack of serious information on the topic and the making of pronouncements on the fly. Of course, that’s nothing new either.
Update 4: I left a comment over at OTB that encapsulates my basic view on this issue:
I guess my bottom line is that I would like to hold a campaign for president to at least the same standard that I would hold a bunch of undergraduates.Sphere: Related Content
The views expressed in the comments are the sole responsibility of the person leaving those comments. They do not reflect the opinion of the author of PoliBlog, nor have they been vetted by the author.
August 11th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
I have a much different take on this over at my site. I agree the first sentence is undoubtedly very similar, but the similarities on the second are superficial, and the third pair bears little similarity.
What’s more, the McCain campaign speech contains information that the Wikipedia page supposedly plagiarized doesn’t contain — namely that Saakashvili (a name I can now spell) was educated in the United States.
August 11th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
I have read a lot of papers in which the student sought to rearrange the wording of a source (Wikipedia in particular) that I have to say that at least on my first two readings, the second paragraph looks like a quick-n-dirty “research” and write job down in a hurry. I have little doubt that the speechwriter Googled “Georgia” and the Wikipedia page was the first (or one of the first) that popped up and the speechwriter used it as the basis for the background portions of the speech.
I see it all the time.
(Of course, I am pretty hardcore on plagiarism in general).
August 11th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
The second pairing has a couple phrases in common, but the similar text between the two cannot really be considered unique: “brief period of independence” and “the Soviet Union in 1922″ is the kind of thing.
And I’ll point again to my point about the third passage containing information not in the supposedly plagiarized text.
Did the writer look at Wikipedia? Very possible. It is the #1 reference site on the Internet. But did they plagiarize? I don’t see that.
August 11th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
@WWB - I actually didn’t accuse the McCain speech of plagiarism, per se, but am more stunned by the Wikipedia usage over such a major issue. I will stand by my statement that if the speech were a paper handed in to me, that second paragraph, linked with the sentence, would likely get a zero from me if the student didn’t cite his/her source.
Now granted, it wasn’t a paper, so the standards are differnt.
Still, I stand by my assertion that the writer gleaned a bunch of info from Wikipedia after a simple Google search. That isn’t exactly major foreign policy bona fides, shall we say.
August 11th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Well, I think Wikipedia is a perfectly reasonable place to start doing research, or to look for quick verification of imperfectly remembered facts — the stuff we can’t always keep in our heads. If they did use Wikipedia here, it does appear to be somewhat sloppy.
I still think it’s an open question whether the phrases actually came from Wikipedia, and even if they did, do we know these phrases couldn’t have been stuck in the writer’s head after a few hours or days? Because this is not a classically Blairian situation, it’s virtually impossible to know.
But anyway, you’re right about needing sources. Citing Wikipedia anywhere is worse than lazy. Even Wikipedia guidelines disapprove (sometimes forbid) unsourced statements — though it’s not always perfect.
August 11th, 2008 at 10:44 pm
Personally, I think getting your facts from wherever you can is fine, especially when you are on deadline.
But I do wonder what would be said if it was the other candidate who did this.
August 11th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
@mark - Well, speaking for myself, the response would have been the same. My views of plagiarism and Wikipedia are pretty clear and consistent.
August 11th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Getting the facts right is paramount. Beyond that, you would think Team McCain or Team Obama for that matter would have sufficient status to backcheck itself.
August 12th, 2008 at 5:23 am
[...] Two political science professors have looked closely at this incident, and reported their analysis. John McCain, Georgia and Wikipedia. By Dr. Steven Taylor [...]
August 12th, 2008 at 6:51 am
[...] former Troy colleague Steven Taylor, while noting that he doesn’t think it’s a big deal, disagrees. The passages noted in [...]
August 12th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
[...] as a paper and checking for plagiarism, it would fail. A couple political science prof’s agree. I agree with most of what they said, especially that McCain should at least keep his speech [...]
August 12th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
“what bothers me about this whole situation, such as it is, (and it isn’t as though it kept me up last night in worry) is that any speech writer for any major candidate would consult Wikipedia for background information.”
Could have been worse. The speech writer could have used Conservapedia.
August 12th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
[...] least two political science professors – Steven Taylor and Mark Kleiman – are convinced by my earlier post that Sen. John McCain used [...]
August 12th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
I took a lot of abuse for it in library school, but to be honest, I don’t have a problem with Wikipedia; in and of itself, I think it’s actually a remarkable accomplishment of information technology. Of course, plaigiarism is not OK, and Wikipedia is a source that may contain bad information, but it is a perfectly legitimate place to get a once-over of something, bearing in mind that what you are reading probably isn’t peer-reviewed. I’ve found that a lot of information on the Wikipedia is actually quite good.
I wouldn’t cite it in a college research paper - but McCain’s speechwriter was not composing a college research paper, nor any other research paper. The individual was simply getting background information on a country to incorporate into a statement. I’m not sure that holding this task up to the scrutiny of college composition is appropriate. Maybe it is, and I’m wrong. But to me these are different disciplines that have different rules.
I always felt that the reasons my instructors at Library School hated the Wikipedia so much were not entirely rational. I think they felt threatened by it and sources like it which are taking the places of reference librarians and their dusty books. Because they can’t villify things like Lexis-Nexis without looking silly, they villify the Wikipedia. I think it’s usually an overreaction, and while the Wiki is not something I would base foreign policy on, it’s something I consult from time to time. Where else can you learn about the origins of Hellboy and also get the gross national product of Belize?
And let’s keep perspective on this thing. McCain wasn’t basing foreign policy on Wikipedia. His speech was a first-reaction thing that probably had to be hammered out very quickly, as I don’t think a lot of people saw this particular crisis coming. Whether his speech writer used the Wiki - right now, it really doesn’t matter. Over the coming weeks there will be time to perform proper research (and I’m sure both candidates’ respective campaigns will do so) and come up with more cogent policy statments.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Can someone post the full text or tell me where to find it. Everyone’s talking about it but I would like to read it for myself.