Tuesday, March 1, 2011

German Internet users sift through the academic work of elected

"We regret that Mr. Guttenberg has not, during the announcement of his resignation, clearly recognized to have committed plagiarism intentionally." The resignation of the German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who was accused of plagiarism massive his doctoral thesis, has not been entirely satisfactory to the members of GuttenPlag Wiki, the collaborative website that brought down the minister.

Launched at the initiative of a lawyer, this project has brought together users who have sifted through the doctoral thesis of Mr. zu Guttenberg, and determined that approximately two thirds of the text consisted of "loans" to d Other authors are not mentioned. Customers have announced that they "continue to work on the analysis of the thesis," and they will publish their results in a final report.

Very organized, internautesont already sifted through most of the thesis of Mr. zu Guttenberg. But even before the closing session, a second Wiki emerged: PlagiPedi intends not to be limited to a single thesis, but to examine the same way as much as possible of academic men and women politicians.

"After the great success of the project GuttenPlag, it is clear that a successful political career, built in part on a university, is not necessarily the result of honest hard work, note the authors of the site. The purpose of this Wiki is to coordinate the efforts of all those who want to check the scientific ethics of those in positions of responsibility in our society.

"The list of texts that users intend to examine is important: there are theses MPs, clerics, judges, or the CEO of Siemens or the head of Deutsche Bahn, German railways. The pages are most active, however, remain dedicated to those men and women politicians, like that of Angela Merkel, who holds a doctorate in quantum chemistry entitled Review of the mechanism of fission reactions with simple decay and calculation of rate constants from the foundations of quantum chemistry and statistical methods.

The analysis did however, is in its infancy. In almost all cases, users are focusing for now on the search for original texts and digitizing them so they can be analyzed in a semi-automatic. Secondly, Volunteers can, after training in research plagiarism, addressing the analysis of texts with various online tools available to them.

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