Since Bill Ackman and his followers have so many questions about how Wikipedia works now that his wife has been accused of plagiarizing from it, I figured I'd help him out.
@molly0xfff Great video, but I wish you'd said it in so many words: plagiarizing public domain works is still plagiarism. You can (legally) steal text from Winnie the Pooh, but you can't (ethically) pretend to have written Winnie the Pooh.
@molly0xfff I'm sure this is addressed but also I'm adding it anyway
YES!!!! The words written are released under creative commons licences, but NOT public domain.
@molly0xfff why is it when conservatives go on a crusade against something it is 100% guaranteed it’s something they do themselves? Someone should research this. Maybe write a Wikipedia article about it.
@molly0xfff hahaha... you have to wonder, what did Bill think would happen? Like, did he think he could just walk in, throw shit at people, and not get it thrown back at him? Did he actually believe that would happen?
@molly0xfff I have to admit that I would have never imagine that a rich scholar who built her whole scholarship on design buzzwords is also a plagiarist. I'm really shocked.
@molly0xfff oops!! I actually kinda feel a little bit sorry for his wife for getting dragged into this, although copying paragraphs of Wikipedia into your doctoral dissertation is pretty unwise and unethical.
@cohomologyisFUN@molly0xfff She chose to marry him. And copying CC material without attribution is actually also a copyright violation - though there won't be legal consequences as WP has better things to do. Finding out that even extreme privilege will not protect you from being made to look bad, will be a valuable life lesson for her.
@martinvermeer@molly0xfff yeah, that’s why I said “a little bit” sorry. Mostly I don’t feel sorry for her. (And even if she lost her job, I have a feeling she’ll be ok)
@nicholas_saunders@molly0xfff I think Molly explained it very well in the video. After Ackman and others alleged Gay of plagiarism, a news outlet brought forward evidence that Ackman’s wife plagiarized from Wikipedia. In response, Ackman asked a bunch of silly questions about Wikipedia, implying that it’s not copyrighted and plagiarizing from it is not actually plagiarism. Since Molly is a pretty serious Wikipedian, it bothered her, so she made this video to rebut Ackman’s implied claims.
"When asked whether they would discipline students (or, I suppose, faculty) if they called for the genocide of Jews, each president responded that the answer depends on the context of the utterances."
Prof Fried
Any plagiarism by Gay is incidental and unrelated to Prof Fried's point.
They are, in theory, orthogonal issues. However, many of the antisemitism complaints are being promoted by the same people pushing the plagiarism accusations against Gay. There’s a suspicion that right-wing political actors care about neither antisemitism nor plagiarism, but are attacking Harvard as part of a broader attack on higher education.
That Ackman is downplaying the allegations against his wife supports this suspicion.
@nicholas_saunders@molly0xfff which isn’t to say there aren’t people genuinely upset about the rise of antisemitism on campuses. I don’t like it either!
But the party welcoming neo-Nazis and other white nationalists into their fold—I simply do not believe they give a single care about antisemitism beyond its potential use as a political tactic.
Great explainer Molly! As a long-time contributor to @wikipedia and #Wikimedia Commons myself, willful ignorance about these projects annoys me to no end as well.
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