Why to not Rely on the Wikipedia, or You Can Put Anything on the Internet

This afternoon I had a bit of extra time and was searching for links to my writings on the Internet. And I hit unexpected pay dirt in the Wikipedia.

More than 2/3 of the content of the article on Franz Karl Kruspe is copied directly from my article on the history of the double horn. My article was originally published in The Horn Call 28, no. 2 (Feb., 1998); their source is clearly the online version from my website. [But see the UPDATE below].

I suppose I should feel honored to make the Wikipedia, but really it is beyond me why anyone would post this article, at least in this form, to begin with. This is extremely sloppy “scholarship.” The entry credits me as the source, as though I created the article in the Wikipedia, but the real creator is not me and altered and augmented my text with new materials. As it stands the article is mostly plagiarized and does not totally make sense.

Always in your writings take the time to attribute sources with accurate quotations. Let this also serve as a gentle reminder to college students and others out there doing research, don’t rely on sources like the Wikipedia, and realize, too, that plagiarized text is very easy to spot….

UPDATE: Almost as soon as I put up this post a reader fixed the Wikipedia listing for Kruspe. It is a lot shorter now with no plagiarism and points to other online resources. A reader also pointed out something I would agree with, that the Wikipedia is a useful resource for general information on a wide variety of topics, just in terms of actual scholarship I would be really careful as to citing it as a source.

Part of what colors what I say in the above is something a “real” scholar working on an article for New Groves said to me a few years back, that “you can put anything on the Internet.” Which is true to a point. This is why a few years ago I actually cut a number of my unpublished articles from my website, keeping online only the ones that had either been published in print or were teaching materials I wanted to keep online access to.