Contributors to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, often referred to as Wikipedians, license their submitted content under a Creative Commons license, which permits re-use as long as attribution is given. However, there have been a number of occasions when persons have failed to give the necessary attribution and attempted to pass off material from Wikipedia as their own work. Such plagiarism is a violation of the Creative Commons license and, when discovered, can be a reason for embarrassment, professional sanctions, or legal issues.
In educational settings, students sometimes copy Wikipedia to fulfill class assignments.[1] A 2011 study by Turnitin found that Wikipedia was the most copied website by both secondary and higher education students.[2]
Many notable individuals and institutions have been credibly said to have committed plagiarism from Wikipedia.
An IB examiner who spoke to The TES said they were "shocked" to discover there were "serious examples of academic dishonesty", throughout the document with guides for 14 of the 24 questions containing large sections copied wholesale from unattributed websites, including Wikipedia. The TES has learned that the mark scheme is one of at least three being urgently investigated by the International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO) over plagiarism allegations as part of a "wide review" into the issue.
The Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency, which interfered in the 2016 election, is using different methods to hide itself better...Now Russian operators are trying to avoid detection by copying and pasting chunks of texts from other sources directly into their posts. When Facebook took down 50 accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency in October [2019], many of the posts featured text copied from Wikipedia.
After the 580-page manuscript was finally submitted by Jean McCorquodale last January, the Mercury News found that many excerpts were allegedly copied word-for-word from the websites she was drawing her research from, including a section from the Wikipedia page for politician Jonathan D. Stevenson, a paragraph from a History Channel article about the Spanish-American War's Treaty of Paris and segments from another page on the Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation website.
The Daily Beast found more than a dozen instances in which Secret Empires, the bestselling book by investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, copied nearly complete sentences or sizable portions of them verbatim or near-verbatim from other sources. In a number of instances, those sources were uncited Wikipedia pages created before the book's publication in early 2018.
