Eric Harmon has published a well-researched, damning account of how the US Department of State has plagiarized from Wikipedia. He shows how the State Department lifted articles from a Wikipedia article in January, and published exact, word-for-word passages in its official article on Cameroon. You’re probably thinking, “but isn’t Wikipedia information free for everyone, since everyone can contribute?” Wikipedia uses something called the GNU Free Documentation License which allows content to be used on other sites as long as the license is included, the origin of the information on Wikipedia is acknowledged, and you do not alter the license terms in future reproductions (i.e. claim that the work is your own copyrighted material). The State Department web site says this much about copyright,

“Unless a copyright is indicated, information on the Department of State Web Site is in the public domain and may be copied and distributed without permission. Citation of the U.S. State Department as source of the information is appreciated.”

I have heard again and again how people are worried that students might use content from the Internet without citation,   and now that I’ve seen this, I think we should stop preemptively pointing the finger at students, and ask why professionals in the State Department don’t care to acknowedge their sources.

I want to also be clear that I have no problem whatsoever with the use of information from Wikipedia. In fact, one could turn this whole affair into a great justification, “Hey, the information on Wikipedia was good enough for the State Department!” but that would do more harm than good to Wikipedia, as it gives the impression that one is somehow defending Wikipedia against a claim of low quality information. Instead, we should use this as an example to illulstrate that what the State Department should have done is link to the Wikipedia article or include excerpts from the article within their own work with acknowledgement of the source, i.e. “The Following excerpt is from the Cameroon article on Wikipedia (April 26, 2006 revision):” or “Wikipedia says (Cameroon article, April 26, 2006 revision):” followed by the exerpt.