NEW YORK - Daniel Brandt, a longtime critic of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written and edited by users, has blasted the site for including many articles with passages lifted from other sites. Brandt said that over a 100 biographical entries contain content that is a blatant copy from other sites.
Wikipedia's administrators acknowledged that there was such plagiarized content and have even deleted few of the articles. Brandt has suspected plagiarism for a long time and in order to prove it, he used a program to run a few sentences from the site's articles and compared the matches with articles on the same topic in Google's search engine.
He bypassed the matches where other sites had copied matter from Wikipedia and ended up having 142 articles that had "borrowed" content from other sites. He brought the same to the notice of Wikipedia's administrators.
"They present it as an encyclopedia," Brandt said on Friday. "They go around claiming it's almost as good as Britannica. They are trying to be mainstream respectable."
The site's founder, Jimmy Wales admitted that sometimes plagiarized content may be allowed to slip in, but said Brandt's findings were exaggerated. Brandt has had a problem with Wikipedia ever since the site published "an unflattering biography of himself." He said Wikipedia must review all articles on its site.
Wikipedia editors have gone through the 142 articles with a fine toothcomb and have passed some for their content since they used passages found in public domain. However some articles, which contained questionable paragraphs, have been completely deleted.
Meanwhile in another blow for Wikipedia, its German edition had a link, which led to a site containing the notorious Blaster worm. The link was present along with spam, which purported to come from Wikipedia It asked users to click on the bogus entry for more information. The page has since been removed from the site.
Security firm Sophos said that Wikipedia's open nature is responsible for the issue. "The very openness of websites like Wikipedia - which allow anyone to edit pages - makes them terrific, but can also make them less trustworthy," said Graham Cluley of Sophos. "In this case, it wasn't just that the information posted in Wikipedia's articles was misleading, it was downright malicious."
