Plagiarism and Velonews

<[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

http://cyclocosm.com/2005/11/cycling-news-plagiarism-rant.html

So this Wednesday, I noticed that there were some, uh, similarities
between a Cyclingnews story and VeloNews story. I'll save you the
long-winded dissertation by just giving you the link to it above. It's
worth a read and some discussion, I think.

-Cosmo

The only similarity is that they both covered the same story. Your
"examples" are absolutely lame. They don't show what you'd like to think
they show. Back under the rock for you.

B. Lafferty said:

<[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

http://cyclocosm.com/2005/11/cycling-news-plagiarism-rant.html

So this Wednesday, I noticed that there were some, uh, similarities
between a Cyclingnews story and VeloNews story. I'll save you the
long-winded dissertation by just giving you the link to it above. It's
worth a read and some discussion, I think.

-Cosmo

The only similarity is that they both covered the same story. Your
"examples" are absolutely lame. They don't show what you'd like to think
they show. Back under the rock for you.

At least he told us that he has major problems with Cyclingnews before
he went off.
It's tough to figure out here. It's a pretty sure thing that they are
working off the same press releases, or sources reading the same press
releases, both cover the details given. Yep must be that Cyclingnews
stole the story, couldn't be any other answer.
Bad Jeff!
Bill C

Bill C said:

B. Lafferty said:

<[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

http://cyclocosm.com/2005/11/cycling-news-plagiarism-rant.html

So this Wednesday, I noticed that there were some, uh, similarities
between a Cyclingnews story and VeloNews story. I'll save you the
long-winded dissertation by just giving you the link to it above.
It's worth a read and some discussion, I think.

-Cosmo

The only similarity is that they both covered the same story. Your
"examples" are absolutely lame. They don't show what you'd like to
think they show. Back under the rock for you.

At least he told us that he has major problems with Cyclingnews
before
he went off.
It's tough to figure out here. It's a pretty sure thing that they are
working off the same press releases, or sources reading the same press
releases, both cover the details given. Yep must be that Cyclingnews
stole the story, couldn't be any other answer.
Bad Jeff!
Bill C

I thought the implication was that VeloNews took the story from
CyclingNews?

It doesn't matter, it is unlikely plagarism was involved, unless you count
two different writers taking the same information from the same press
release as plagarism.

--
Bill Asher

William Asher said:

Bill C said:

B. Lafferty said:

<[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...
> http://cyclocosm.com/2005/11/cycling-news-plagiarism-rant.html
>
> So this Wednesday, I noticed that there were some, uh, similarities
> between a Cyclingnews story and VeloNews story. I'll save you the
> long-winded dissertation by just giving you the link to it above.
> It's worth a read and some discussion, I think.
>
> -Cosmo
>

The only similarity is that they both covered the same story. Your
"examples" are absolutely lame. They don't show what you'd like to
think they show. Back under the rock for you.

At least he told us that he has major problems with Cyclingnews
before
he went off.
It's tough to figure out here. It's a pretty sure thing that they are
working off the same press releases, or sources reading the same press
releases, both cover the details given. Yep must be that Cyclingnews
stole the story, couldn't be any other answer.
Bad Jeff!
Bill C

I thought the implication was that VeloNews took the story from
CyclingNews?

It doesn't matter, it is unlikely plagarism was involved, unless you count
two different writers taking the same information from the same press
release as plagarism.

--
Bill Asher

My screw up.got it backwards Sorry.
Bill C

Bill C wrote:

<snip>

Quoted message said:

My screw up.got it backwards Sorry.

No really, it doesn't matter. I just thought if I pointed out the error
first it might prevent Mad Dog from flaming you. Ok, nothing would stop
that, but the real reason was I was hoping it would make me look super
smart, Heidi Fleiss would hear about me and hire me to work in her new
brothel for women, and I would get to ride a bicycle, among other things,
in a warm climate for a change.

I guess this post blows away the first one in terms of intelligence but
then I didn't really want to move to Nevada anyway. It's all good.

--
Bill Asher

William Asher said:

Bill C wrote:

<snip>

Quoted message said:

My screw up.got it backwards Sorry.

No really, it doesn't matter. I just thought if I pointed out the error
first it might prevent Mad Dog from flaming you. Ok, nothing would stop
that, but the real reason was I was hoping it would make me look super
smart, Heidi Fleiss would hear about me and hire me to work in her new
brothel for women, and I would get to ride a bicycle, among other things,
in a warm climate for a change.

I guess this post blows away the first one in terms of intelligence but
then I didn't really want to move to Nevada anyway. It's all good.

--
Bill Asher

That Nevada thing just might be a pretty good gig, if you didn't end
up spending the paycheck next door, and ended up too worn out to ride.
MD seems to have a thing for Brian, like that's odd around here, but
Brian's a big boy. If he wants to flame me, he's going to have to fight
it out with Amit to see who gets to go first.
No big deal, keeps me on my toes and honest.
Bill C

Guys, there's like what, 700,000 words in the English language? And
these two articles, each like 200 words long, came up with the same
word, what 5, 6 times? And you see nothing unusual with that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Number_of_words_in_English

-Cosmo
http://cyclocosm.com

Quoted message said:

Guys, there's like what, 700,000 words in the English language? And
these two articles, each like 200 words long, came up with the same
word, what 5, 6 times? And you see nothing unusual with that?

No.

On 11/18/2005 11:17 PM, in article
[email hidden],

Quoted post said:

Guys, there's like what, 700,000 words in the English language? And
these two articles, each like 200 words long, came up with the same
word, what 5, 6 times? And you see nothing unusual with that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Number_of_words_in_English

Writers for the English newspaper, the Times of London, must each wear at
least 5 articles of the same unusual clothing; with long words that came out
of another language.

Oh my god, I just used the same word as Cosmo something like 15 times! I'm
a plagiarist!

--
Steven L. Sheffield
stevens at veloworks dot com
bellum pax est libertas servitus est ignoratio vis est
ess ay ell tea ell ay kay ee sea eye tee why you ti ay aitch
aitch tee tea pea colon [for word] slash [four ward] slash double-you
double-yew double-ewe dot veloworks dot com [foreword] slash

Bill C says...

Quoted message said:

MD seems to have a thing for Brian

Uggh, no thanks. Just an easy target.

Quoted message said:

No big deal, keeps me on my toes and honest.

Now if you'll work on accurate and correct, we'll have a minor league win.

"Mad Dog" <[email hidden]> wrote in message

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

No big deal, keeps me on my toes and honest.

Now if you'll work on accurate and correct, we'll have a minor league win.

Speak for yourself.

Steven L. Sheffield said:

On 11/18/2005 11:17 PM, in article
[email hidden],
"[email hidden]" <[email hidden]> wrote:

Writers for the English newspaper, the Times of London, must each wear at
least 5 articles of the same unusual clothing; with long words that came out
of another language.

Oh my god, I just used the same word as Cosmo something like 15 times! I'm
a plagiarist!

You weren't writing on the same topic as I was. Additionally, you
didn't use a nearly identical sentence structure, and you weren't
getting paid to do it.

"Writers for the Times of London have to wear at least 5 articles of
the same unusual clothing. Journalists at the English paper must also
wear those clothes with long words that came out of another language."

That would be plagiarism, if you'd written your reply for one
publication, and I'd written the section in quotation marks above in
another.

Quoted message said:

Guys, there's like what, 700,000 words in the English language? And
these two articles, each like 200 words long, came up with the same
word, what 5, 6 times? And you see nothing unusual with that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Number_of_words_in_English

Cos,

Most of those words are hardly ever used.

A typical text of 30-40,000 words might use only about 2000-4000
unique words. If you've ever written a long text, try running a
concordance program on it. It's sobering to realize how
repetitive we are.

The cyclingnews and velonews articles are clearly both referring
to a common source or sources. You can tell that, because they
both refer to things Zomegnan told the Italian press, but they
used entirely different quotes. Either both writers are reading the
Italian papers or they both have the same press releases from
the UCI and Zomegnan. It's fairly common for articles to use
material from press releases without citing the release
(that's what press releases are for). When you read an article
in the newspaper that says "Person X said Y," it doesn't
necessarily mean that the reporter called X to get the quote,
but that the quote was relayed by an authorized source -
press release, spokesman, publicist, etc.

The first sentences you quote have very similar content, but they
are statements of the basic facts. The only really odd thing is
that both articles end by mentioning the Tour of the Basque
Country. It's possible one mention inspired the other, but it's
also possible that the Basque situation was aired among the
cycling press sometime during the couple of days that the UCI
and Giro were batting around this half-stage business.

In general, it's hard to prove a charge of plagiarism (even at
the undergrad level) on statements of bare fact, without finding
literal copying. There are only so many ways to express a fact.
On the other hand, similarities in descriptions and opinion
passages are more suspicious.

If you care more about this there have been a bunch of articles
in Slate over the past few years, especially Tim Noah's pursuit
of well-known yet serial-copyists Doris Kearns Goodwin and
Stephen Ambrose:

http://www.slate.com/?querytext=plagiarism&id=3944&searchfromtoc=Go&action=fulltext

Steven L. Sheffield said:

Oh my god, I just used the same word as Cosmo something like 15 times! I'm
a plagiarist!

Get with the program and learn to post in french. Only works for doping
posts though, but thats ok since it covers 90% of rbr posts anyway,

Steven L. Sheffield said:

On 11/18/2005 11:17 PM, in article
[email hidden],

Quoted post said:

Guys, there's like what, 700,000 words in the English language? And
these two articles, each like 200 words long, came up with the same
word, what 5, 6 times? And you see nothing unusual with that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Number_of_words_in_English

Writers for the English newspaper, the Times of London, must each wear at
least 5 articles of the same unusual clothing; with long words that came out
of another language.

Oh my god, I just used the same word as Cosmo something like 15 times! I'm
a plagiarist!

There's some sort of conspiracy of plagerists going on here. Every post
I've looked at uses the word "the".

Uh-oh! Now I've been roped into the conspiracy too! Triply so!

Steven L. Sheffield said:

Oh my god, I just used the same word as Cosmo something like 15 times! I'm
a plagiarist!

Get with the program and learn to post in french. Only works for doping
posts though, but thats ok since it covers 90% of rbr posts anyway,

"[email hidden]" <[email hidden]> wrote in
news:[email hidden]:

Quoted message said:

Guys, there's like what, 700,000 words in the English language? And
these two articles, each like 200 words long, came up with the same
word, what 5, 6 times? And you see nothing unusual with that?

<snip>

I think there are better conspiracies to waste bandwidth on than this one.

And remember, you can't spell "platyhelminthes" without the first three
letters of "plagarism."

--
Bill Asher

It's only plagiarism if it's a *good* story.

It's all liner for the birdcage in the end.

-Chris Mitchell

Bill C says...

Quoted message said:

As soon as I move up to knowing it all like you, I'll let you know but
don't hold your breath.

I won't even pretend to hold my breath on that one. Thanks for the promotion up
to Know It All status but it's not really deserved. For example, I don't have
the slightest idea why people here have the bizarre fixations they have. But
I'm pretty sure I don't want to know and I've always thought it is more
important to know what kinds of things to avoid knowing instead of just
accumulating a bunch of [censored].

Quoted message said:

But I will pretend to aspire to your standards, NOT.

Pretending is about all you could do along those lines.

Quoted message said:

Sorry what you see is what you get, and the really cool thing is that
when I'm wrong, I learn things. I picked up a bunch of stuff from you
and Howard in that thread.

That's great. I learned some good stuff as a result of it too and that's about
the only goal I have. There always seems to be a crossing of paths when it
comes to Johnny Cash. Like when he died, it was like a disturbance in the
force. Did you feel the force, Luke, er, I mean, Bill?

Quoted message said:

Looks like I got something good out of being imperfect again.

Who would really want to be perfect? I enjoy my multitude of imperfections. I
collect them like a kid does candy at Halloween, except that I avoid eating them
later.