Wall Street Folly

Our first nomination to our site scraper hall of shame:  We’re getting a bit tired of this.  From time to time we’ve noticed that websites have been using our ideas / news finds without the customary attribution.  We’ve tried to deal with it privately when it’s happened, and that’s mostly been successful.  However, now it’s time to go public with one of them, where emailing hasn’t gotten results.   We (and several of our readers) have noticed that many of the items that we post wind up on Dealbreaker after we post them.  We know that they visit our site often — we see their footprints all over our detailed blog logs.  We believe that many of their news items originate here and they don’t own up to it; instead, they attribute the original source as if they’ve found the news on their own.  Of course there’s bound to be some natural overlap because we tend to be attracted to much of the same material from many of the same sites; clearly just because they put up news after us doesn’t mean they’ve gotten it from our site even if we know they saw it here before they posted it; they could have seen it elsewhere first and just not had the time to blog on it.  But the frequency with which they choose to blog on the same items that we do after visiting us, seems beyond coincidence, especially if the news we’ve found has come from an esoteric site or is on a wacky subject.   And yes, Dealbreaker provides some attribution.  But not nearly as often as we believe is deserved.

Here’s one example, of many we could cite: Take the Halloween mask link that Bess Levin posted late this afternoon from Forbes.  We posted the same link earlier in the day in our post: "Eleventh hour Halloween ideas"   We noted from Dealbreaker’s multiple late afternoon visits to our site, hitting our link to that post over and over, that they were fascinated with it.  We actually noticed it as it was happening.  And they kept coming back to it.  And only earlier in the day John Carney, on Dealbreaker, lamented the lack of good Halloween ideas:

Finally, there are no good Wall Street themed costumes this year. Discernable visages such as Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken are dated. How do you dress like Amaranth or Backdating? Isn’t natural gas invisible?

We guess you could do “A.J.” or “Lucy Gao” or “Aleksey Vayner” but those folks lack a certain, uhm, visual presence required for a good costume. Who can tell the difference between an Aleksey Vayner costume and that douchebag who hated Ralph Macchio in the Karate Kid.

We thought the Forbes masks were cute Halloween ideas. Dealbreaker apparently did too, later on, with their "Last minute Halloween options" link, after the earlier lament.  It’s pretty clear to us that they got the idea and the link on WSF.  Yet they didn’t happen to provide that information. 

Bottom line: We think that’s just wrong.  When we find news, we cite our source.  If it comes from a blog, we cite the blog as well as the original source if they provide it.  And we think Dealbreaker should be doing the same. All the time. So, SHAME ON YOU DEALBREAKER.  If you’re going to use our stuff, please own up to where it came from.  Don’t just scrape and run. That’s just rude.

Interestingly, there’s been a recent case at Harvard regarding a Harvard Crimson columnist’s failure to attribute part of her story to Slate, bypassing them and quoting only from the original source.  She and her column were given the boot….

From the Harvard Crimson:

In an editors’ note posted on its website last night, The Crimson also said it was discontinuing the biweekly series “On Our Language,” by Victoria B. Ilyinsky ’07. Her Oct. 16 piece on the usage of the word “literally” contained quotations from Louisa May Alcott and F. Scott Fitzgerald that were cited in a Nov. 1, 2005, Slate.com article entitled, “The Word We Love to Hate.”

In addition, Ilyinsky’s Oct. 16 column, “This Word Is Killing Me, Literally,” used a quotation from a televised football game that also appeared in a blog linked from the Slate article. The editors’ note said that Ilyinsky’s piece “implies that the author heard the commentary herself. In fact, she learned of the account by reading about it on the web log, ‘Literally, A Web Log.’”

It was the first time since 2001 that The Crimson has formally retracted an opinion column, according to its archives. And Crimson President William C. Marra ’07 said that the newspaper would review Ilyinsky’s past columns….

“It’s very clear that this Slate article had a huge effect on her writing of this piece,” Silverman said, after being e-mailed the similarities between Ilyinsky’s column, the Slate article, and the blog.

“Whether it was what inspired her to write it is tough to know or not—in a technical sense it’s not actual plagiarism, but there is certainly an element of misrepresentation and perhaps a theft of idea or concept,” Silverman said.

The “Writing With Sources” guide published by Harvard’s Expository Writing Program states in its section on plagiarism that “your citation must accurately reflect your process.” The guide instructs students to cite the document where they found information or quotations—even if that document in turn cites a separate source. To students who disobey this rule, the guide warns, “you are misleading your reader and possibly embarrassing yourself.”

Exactly.

Crimson Cuts Columnist for Lifting Material – Harvard Crimson