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Re: W3C suckered by Microsoft?

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: W3C suckered by Microsoft?
• From: Greg Colyer <greg-xml@e...>
• Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 11:38:35 +0000
• In-reply-to: <15725CF6AFE2F34DB8A5B4770B7334EE03F9F467@h...>
• References: <15725CF6AFE2F34DB8A5B4770B7334EE03F9F467@h...>
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> http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/03/09/college.president.ap/index.html

... which includes the hilarious comment: "I mistakenly assumed notes I 
had made were my own ..."

Sounds suspiciously like an Orwellian forced confession that the emperor 
does have clothes. Is it now a crime to forget something?

As I said, the academic culture of citation is something of a conceit, 
promoted not least because authors get brownie-points for citations. 
Their accuracy is given much less weight than their existence, as I have 
frequently found by following them up.

I would have thought that uncited truth is generally more helpful than, 
for example, cited untruth, but this notion almost runs counter to that 
particular culture. Of course, no-one is disputing that cited truth is 
the ideal, but with limited resources would you be better off spending 
them checking the facts or finding the originator of the perhaps-not-facts?

I suspect that another reason for the obsession with plagiarism is its 
increased detectability rather than its increased incidence. At least 
the web does help one to find "other" sources for an item of 
information, even if it doesn't do much to help establish which (if any) 
may be the "first" source.

Some of the points that have been made are arguments not against the 
bloggers but simply against trusting certain automated analyses (e.g. 
page-ranking) of them.

• References:
  • RE: W3C suckered by Microsoft?
    • From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>

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