Chris Anderson Says Copied Wikipedia Passages Were Unintentional Mistake

Posted on June 25, 2009

Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson has admitted that some of the passages in his new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price were copied from Wikipedia. Anderson says the passages were unintentionally left without a credit to Wikipedia, an online user-edited encyclopedia.

Anderson tells The L.A. Times, "I made the decision to nuke the notes because we couldn't come up with a compromise citation form. I thought time stamps looked silly in books and my publisher insisted on time stamps. I made the decision to nuke the notes entirely -- and then to integrate the attribution into the text, which I -- ... then screwed up."

Chris Anderson's publisher Hyperion has accepted his explanation and apology. Hyperion has released the following statement, "We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson's response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book."

The copied passages were revealed in a blog post by Waldo Jaquith in the Virginia Quarterly Review.