Top critic nixes plagiarism charge: Epilogue

This is a continuation of our web page that demonstrates how one of today's most avid critics of Ellen White doesn't think plagiarism is really all that big a deal.

After finding our web page on this topic, by the end of January 2005 Dirk Anderson had added the following credits for two of the three paragraphs that he plagiarized:

But why he didn't also put those plagiarized paragraphs in quotation marks, we do not know. Copying 79% of the words of a paragraph from someone else may not have required quotation marks in the 1800's, but it is definitely required today, even when one gives proper credit in a footnote.

Notice carefully the wording of Dirk's footnote: "David Gilbert, 'Dansville's "Castle on the Hill" ' (c. 1997)". Does that look familiar? It should. That's the exact same wording from the heading of our comparison at the top of our initial web page. In giving credit to David Gilbert, Dirk "stole" the wording right from our web page.

Trivial? Extremely. We wouldn't even mention it except that Gilbert's article gives no hint when it was written. We were the source of the information that the article was written around 1997. In this day and age of hypersensitivity toward plagiarism, Dirk really should have cited us as the source for that date in his footnote. In fact, we've asked him to give us proper credit.

Dirk sent us the rough draft of his web page, which does say "ref: Gilbert http://dansville.lib.ny.us/historyo.html" after the first few paragraphs. Dirk claims that he forgot to include this reference in his final draft. Without evidence to the contrary, we believe the kind, proper, and Christian thing to do is to assume that this is exactly what happened. And probably, to be fair and balanced, whenever Ellen White did not include a citation required by 19th century standards, the kind, proper, and Christian thing to do would be to assume that she made an innocent and honest mistake too.