With all due respect to the diligent journalists who revealed it, I don’t think it’s a big deal that some bits of Rachel Reeves’ book about women in economics were copied from Wikipedia.
The book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, was launched at an Institute for Government event in Westminster on Wednesday evening. An examination by the FT of the book found more than 20 examples of passages from other sources that appeared to be either lifted wholesale, or reworked with minor changes, without acknowledgment.
Some biographical text about women economists spotlighted by Reeves, who hopes to become Britain’s first female chancellor if Labour wins the next election, was lifted wholesale from Wikipedia. Cue ‘controversy’.
The line that divides ‘plagiarism’ from ‘research’ is a fine and essentially arbitrary one
Now, I have never written a book of my own, but in 26 years of writing for newspapers, magazines and newspapers I’ve probably produced a couple of million words of published copy. I doubt it will shock anyone to learn that not all of those words were wholly original.
In some instances, this amounts to unacknowledged quotation from other documents. So where I’ve written a column that refers to say, a select committee report that found ‘officials failed to pay due regard to the evidence’ I might well paste that phrase into my copy, remove the quote marks and move on, perhaps without attribution.
In other cases, the source text is me: I’ve probably used and re-used the same sentence or paragraph for something multiple times. In some cases I’ve done it unwittingly: a good phrase sticks in the mind and is easy to reach for when you’re writing quickly as I tend to.
Indeed, earlier in my career as a reporter, the only way to churn out a high volume of copy at speed was to make liberal use of others’ words, whether from agencies (‘Take in PA’ as we used to say when we meant ‘copy the rest off the wires’) or from the cuttings of other newspaper reporters.
Of course, you’d move a word or two out of professional courtesy, but does that make a difference? This works both ways: I’ve seen my own paragraphs reproduced – with some cosmetic changes – in lots of others’ work and never thought anything of it.
Nor am I alone in this. As well as writing I’ve done several years of editing in various guises, reading the raw, as-filed copy of many journalists and writers. If you edit for long enough, you see a great many things in the work of writers, including the bits that they’ve quickly lifted from another source then then thinly disguised by changing a word or two. ‘CTRL-C + CTRL-V’ should probably get its own byline in some publications.
I’m not revealing or alleging any wrongdoing here. Almost any sort of non-fiction writing draws, in some way, on the words of others. And the line that divides ‘plagiarism’ from ‘research’ is a fine and essentially arbitrary one. If Reeves – or more accurately her research assistants – had changed a few more words in the sentences they copied from Wikipedia, no one would have minded or noticed, even though the resultant book would have been essentially identical to the one that’s causing the current fuss.
I don’t, as a habit, use Wikipedia as source material because not everything there is 100 per cent accurate. But as far as I know, no one is suggesting that Reeves has written anything that’s actually factually incorrect as a result of all this. Rather her imputed offence appears to be some sort of deception against readers: apparently without clear acknowledgment of sourcing, readers will be misled into thinking Reeves conjured up the relevant information from her own knowledge. Knowledge that she would, of course, have accrued by reading others’ writing.
Personally, I suspect readers are not so naive. They understand that most things they read draw on the writing of others, and either don’t mind or don’t notice. By way of evidence, I offer this article.
If you’ve read this far, you’ve read three paragraphs that – to illustrate my point – I copied directly from three other publications. Now that I’ve pointed that out, you can probably spot them, though you’ll have to do some googling to work out where I took them from.
Exactly where words come from matters a lot less than how those words are used. The world would be a better and more interesting place if the people getting excited about Rachel Reeves’ use of source materials spent their energy engaging instead with her arguments and ideas.
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