"It's a Good Thing" *

I'm posting a rare second post today because the recent scandal involving Dov Bear has been weighing heavily on my mind.  It's not that I'm such a great friend of Dov bear.  I mean, I think he's very bright, and I admire his ability to coax an argument out of even the most docile reader.  But at the same time I've made no secret of my distaste for bloggers who stir up controversy for controversy's sake.

Well, it now seems that the gods of irony have turned the tables on DB as he now finds himself the focus of a very serious controversy.  He has been accused of lifting entire blocks of text from multiple sources on an ongoing basis without providing proper attribution.  In short, he stands accused of being a plagiarist.

To his credit Dov Bear has publicly (and privately) admitted to the accusations, but IMHO his mea culpa fell a few articles of clothing short of 'the full monty'.  For example, he opened his apology with "I am writing to update you on my efforts to address the allegations made against me...", and then goes on to say that his lapses were borne of laziness rather than dishonesty.  I am certainly not in a position to judge the correctness of that sentiment, but I felt compelled to leave a response on his blog none-the-less:

Full disclosure:  I have fixed a couple of bone-headed spelling errors before republishing my comment here.

[Dear Dov Bear]

I'm certainly in no position to 'cast the first stone' since, although I try to attribute anything I present on my blog which isn't my own... I do sometimes get lazy after a quick search fails to turn up an authoritative source.

But that isn't really what we're talking about here, is it?

Two suggestions DB:

1. Your use of the word "allegations" in your mea culpa is ill advised. It suggests that the accusations are unfounded (i.e. that you allegedly copied material without providing attribution). Allegations are accusations that have been made but not proved. Is that really what you still maintain?

2. While I agree with an earlier commenter that Dov Weasel [the anonymous blogger who leveled the accusations] clearly has too much time on his/her hands... the issues raised are serious. It isn't that you used a picture that appeared on several sites without trying to find out who actually took/owned it (something I have done too frequently). It isn't that you used/paraphrased a witty expression you heard or read without giving credit because it would have taken too long to track down the original source (again, something I admit freely to having done). What you are accused of is copying large blocks of text from their source (indicating you knew where they came from) and pasting them into your blog. Further, in most cases you made small cosmetic changes to the phrasing. A cynical person would say that you made these small changes to throw off anti-plagiarism software that searches for verbatim text lifts... but I think you were probably just unhappy with the way the original text fit into your flow of thought and simply wanted to tweak it. However this doesn't minimize the fact that attributing the source would have taken far less time than the additional tweaking you did afterward. It would have been as simple as the cut and past that brought the ill-gotten prose into your domain in the first place.

You are a bright guy... nobody can reasonably say otherwise after having read you for even a short time. So I can't help but wonder why you cared more for other people's ideas than your own... so much so that you appropriated them. But that seems to be what you did. It wasn't laziness and it wasn't an oversight. It was plagiarism.

You haven't lost most of your reader's trust, and you certainly haven't lost mine... yet. But unless you make a clean breast of what happened here I think you will find it hard to shake this scandal off.

Do you really want to end up the Joseph Biden of the Jblogosphere? I mention Biden because in the end it turned out he was guilty of far less than he was accused of... but because he obfuscated and dodged rather than admitting that yes, on one single occasion he had acted unethically... he is now remembered incorrectly by many as a serial plagiarist.

I honestly don't wish that on you.

Although I don't envy Dov Bear his moment of notoriety, I do think it is a healthy development for the blogosphere that a form of peer censure has occurred.  Years ago the blogosphere prided itself on its free-wheeling, 'wild west', anything goes way of conducting business.  We were like a bunch of kids on a playground with no grown-ups around to impose the stuffy rules of organized society on us. 

Pictures, stories, jokes, memes and just about anything else on which we could lay/click our grubby little mice were passed around without attribution.  Anyone who complained about purloined intellectual property... pilfered prose... ill-gotten images... was called an old hen or a prude.  The very idea of private ownership seemed antithetical to the way the web had organized itself.  Bandwidth was something other people shell out for and hot content was only occasionally 'paid for' with a 'hat tip' to the last person who had 'borrowed' it.

What we failed to realize back then was that we weren't playing in a schoolyard devoid of teachers.  We were more like the castaway children in William Golding's 'Lord of the flies' who, in the absence of the conventions of organized society, had become savages.

The fact that we now have a situation where a blogger has leveled charges of plagiarism... and that those charges aren't being 'poo-poohed' is, quite frankly, incredible!  This is a promising indication of the blogosphere's slow transition into a serious, mature medium.  That plagiarism is being debated in many corners of the Jblogosphere is extremely healthy... and that the accused himself seems to be [mostly] taking the charge quite seriously is perhaps the most positive sign of all.

The MSM has historically looked down its nose at the blogosphere, calling us a bunch of unruly children lacking in journalistic and ethical standards.  A few years ago that might have been mostly true, but the way the Dov Bear scandal is being picked over and debated among bloggers provides hope that the blogosphere has indeed passed from its unruly childhood into the realm of adult rules and standards.

As Martha Stewart would say (* note the internal attribution there, DB), "It's a good thing."