Plagiarism 2.0

Well, it happened.

I was simply preparing a lecture, one I would record with Microsoft's Photostory 3 (a wonderful way to deliver online lectures, by the way) and post to an online class, one that is writing film analyses. The film was Joel and Ethan Coen's O Brother Where Art Thou? The lecture was simply on parallels between the film and it's classical Greek inspiration, Homer's Odyssey. I had an ample supply of material, but I wanted to make sure I hadn't overlooked anything. As I often do when in need of ideas, I turned to Wikipedia. There were some good ideas there, and a bulleted list of connections between the film and the Homeric saga. But it lacked a few of the more subtle-but-significant connections. So I added them. Hey, that's what Wikipedia is all about, right? I finished the lecture and posted it. A few weeks passed.

Soon I was grading analysis essays from my students. Some were on The Matrix and Plato's Republic, some were on Baudrillard's notion of hyperreality and the simulacra as they manifest in Fight Club, and some were on O Brother Where Art Thou? and Homer's Odyssey. I was grading one of the latter. And there I was. Halfway down the page, my own words winked knowingly, sardonically even, out at me. Verbatim. Pristine as the moment I keyed them into that mammoth information repository that is Wikipedia. And utterly unsullied by anything resembling quotation marks or a citation. My own student had plagiarized me.

It's a web web web web world.