Yes, Copying From Wikipedia is Plagiarism
The question of whether Neri Oxman’s Wikipedia use is plagiarism has a pretty simple answer.
Wikipedia describes plagiarism as “the representation of another person’s language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one’s own original work.” The basic principle is that authors should give credit for something that they did not themselves produce. Sounds simple, right? Not something that could trigger a slew of angry op-ed pieces and inflame the social media discourse, right?
Wrong. Across the business and academic worlds, plagiarism is the “gotcha” issue of the age. Although it’s worth reading the full play-by-play from Slate’s own Nitish Pahwa, here is a high-level, Wikipedia-style summary of recent events: Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager and well-known critic of DEI programs, fought for months to oust Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president. According to Ackman, Gay failed to sufficiently protect Jewish students on Harvard’s campus in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and subsequent campus protests. In December, Gay appeared together with the presidents of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania for a congressional hearing about antisemitism, after which Ackman joined the chorus of critics saying that Gay failed to show sufficient “moral clarity” on the issue.
But Ackman went further when he circulated a story to his 1.1 million followers on X that Gay had plagiarized up to 40 passages in her past academic work. Ackman tweeted that Gay had a “serious plagiarism issue” and suggested that an ordinary student would be expelled for similar behavior. Although Harvard’s governing board initially stood by Gay, it changed its mind following intense public pressure. On Jan. 2, Gay resigned, saying that stepping down was in the best interests of the university.
Two days later, Business Insider reported that its investigative team had found numerous instances of plagiarism in the doctoral dissertation of Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, formerly a tenured professor of design at MIT. In addition to copying from fellow scholars and her academic mentee, BI noted 15 instances in which Oxman copied sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia without providing any attribution. For instance, Oxman copied hundreds of words from the Wikipedia entry on “Weaving” without adding quotation marks. (To conduct its analysis, BI used archived versions of Wikipedia to review the exact language that appeared on the site in 2010, when Oxman published her dissertation.)
Since BI published its report, critics have claimed that the story is a tit-for-tat response to Ackman’s own plagiarism charges against Gay. That’s almost certainly true, although an internal review nonetheless found that the article was “accurate and well documented” with “no unfair bias.” Nevertheless, Ackman has threatened to sue BI and its related corporate entities, in what may well become the next example of billionaires trying to punish the free press for unflattering coverage.
For purposes of this specific Source Notes column, it’s perhaps best to park some issues and instead focus on a single thread: Is it really plagiarism to copy from Wikipedia without providing credit?
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