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Wired editor and the author of the forthcoming, Free, Chris Anderson has been drawing fire for lifting passages from Wikipedia and using them in his book. The Virginia Quarterly Review has the story.

Okay, sorry. I didn’t write that, folks. My fault. Let’s try again:

In the course of reading Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion, $26.99), for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, I have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources. These instances were identified after a cursory investigation, after I checked by hand several dozen suspect passages in the whole of the 274-page book.

Okay, stop. Again, sorry. Didn’t write that, either. I truly apologize and hope to make it up to everyone. Let’s go again:

Chris Anderson is the editor for Wired Magazine, a prominent tech journalist and a long-time advocate of the “free” business model. His upcoming book, entitled “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” has been the talk of many in the tech sectors as it deals with the idea of giving content away for free and then earning a living through other means.

However, even before the book has been officially released, it has become mired in controversy. Waldo Jaquith of the Virginia Quarterly Review (VGR), a literary review journal associated with the University of Virginia, noticed similarities between some passages in Anderson’s book and other sources. After putting some passages through Google, he found over a dozen instances where it appears Anderson copied content from Wikipedia as well as other sources. These allegations were furthered by Edward Champion on his site, who compared several more passages from other books and blog posts. This has sparked a firestorm of controversy on both Twitter and the comments section of the VGR post.

Um, okay. So I’m starting to get confused. Did I write the above passage or not? I can’t remember! Here’s what I think happened: I cut & pasted those sections from other online journals and then removed the quotation marks without much thought as I drafted this blog post. Silly me, ha ha. Please don’t judge too harshly. After all, I only hold a BA in English, and a master’s degree in writing. I’ve only worked as a freelance writer for a handful of newspapers and other tiny little publications. Oh, and I teach writing – and I’ve published in a few journals. (And I have a novel just released.) So I’m off the hook, right? Not like I work for a huge, internationally renown magazine that you can find at B&N as well as many grocery stores.

Oh, wait. That sounds familiar, too. Here’s what Chris Anderson told The New York Times:

Mr. Anderson said in a telephone interview. “Mea culpa.” He said that he originally had put the Wikipedia material in quotations, but that he and his publisher had not been able to agree on a format for citations. When he took the passages out of quotations, he failed to attribute Wikipedia or rewrite the material in his own words. “That’s my screw-up,” he said.

Now I’m getting depressed. So I can’t even plagiarize originally? Indeed, no. I’ve plagiarized Anderson’s plagiarism. The horror. Here, let me redeem myself. I’ll give you links to the original sources I’ve used. There, and there.

Hey. This is, like, the easiest blogpost I’ve ever made! Now, let me point out some ironies. First, Anderson’s selling his book on the merits of “free content” for $25. Does he plan to post the whole thing online? Also, I’ll bet making everything you write free sounds pretty good if all you do is sew together Wiki notes. Me, though, I think I’ll hoard my single digit royalties from book sales. Not that I’m complaining. These days to have a book published at all is a huge accomplishment, along the lines of landing on the moon without a rocket.

Now I’ll ponder whether or not I can legitimately fail freshmen for slipping big chocolate bar chunks of uncited wiki into their final papers. Hmmmmm. Herrmmm. Tick tock, tick tock. Yeah.

Oh, and Michael Jackson’s dead. More on that soon. Not that I plan to make fun of Michael Jackson for being dead. Or that I ever made fun of Jackson. In fact, when I was seven I almost got into a fight with some kids who were making fun of him. Well, the hole gets deeper with every word. Doesn’t it?