The BG News and Wikipedia

I'm sure that plagiarism has happened at college newspapers across the country, so I set out looking. So far I haven't come up with much in googling through a few articles, but this Kid Icarus review from The BG News and its similarities to the Kid Icarus Wikipedia entry got me thinking.

Let's check out a few quotes.

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From Article:
"Pit runs and jumps vertically and horizontally across levels, just like Mario. He shoots arrows much like Samus Aran shoots her gun in the original "Metroid." He also collects treasures just as Link does in "The Legend of Zelda" series. There are also some RPG elements involved."

From Wiki:
"In volume 204 of Nintendo Power, an article was written about the game describing it as blending together elements from The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros. and Metroid, stating that Pit can 'jump like Mario, collect items like Zelda, and shoot enemies like Metroid.' "

From Article:
"Released on the same date and using the same game engine as the original "Metroid," "Kid Icarus" was overshadowed and forgotten by those who had not played it."

[By the way, this fact seems wrong. My own wikipedia search says that Kid Icarus was released in July 1987, and Metroid in August of the same year]

From Wiki:
"Kid Icarus is often compared to Metroid (which was released the same year), as it uses the same game engine."

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So, is this plagiarism or coincidence? What if, instead of a video game review, this was a sociology paper submitted to a journal (and, obviously, was about sociology instead of wii virtual console games)?

I emailed BGNews editors yesterday, letting them know this was going up and asking for comment. They did not respond.

Daily Writer Commits Plagiarism

According to an Editor's Note in today's paper, an Arts Writer committed some serious copy-and-paste style plagiarism. Given this now-ironic entry, our previous plagiarism discussions, and the fact that the Daily is all over the fishbowl, I figured this was relevant to this site.

The Daily's editor's note (figured this would be more legible than a scan)

I did some googling. Here's what I came up with.



Here's an Image Socket mirror in case the ImageShack link goes down:


Plagiarism is bringing the world to an end.

Congrats Devika: You just got yourself fired and made the Daily look stupid. I don't know how you figured you could plagiarize four out of your seven articles (according to a search on the Daily website) and make it out unscathed.

Edit (3/26/07): See also this editor's note. Daga also plagiarized in four other articles. In other words, it seems that every article she wrote had plagiarism in it.