404 Error!

Working in academia and the information sciences, plagiarism and academic cheating are a real concern.  This form of creating inaccurate information is not only intentionally misleading, but in academic institutions, it is considered dishonesty and/or fraud and comes with serious consequences.

We have ways to test now for replication of information from other sources, however one form of "trickier" plagiarism which I have had recent experience with, thanks to one of my students, is writing a piece that includes citations to non-existent or inaccurate information about sources (TurnItIn, 2015).  Often referred to as the “Misinformer”, this type of writer provides inaccurate information regarding the sources, making it impossible to find them... hence resulting in this error message:  

 

Frustrating?  Right!  Challenging to detect?  Absolutely unless you check every reference.   We often think if the item is referenced, it must be more accurate.  In fact, citing and cross-referencing shows up frequently in various checklists for evaluating quality of content! 

However, just goes to show, doing our due diligence and actually checking the references that have been cited can be just as important; we can't rely simply on the fact that they are included!  Also, as pointed out in our Verifiable Information and Indexing module, "people often do not have the time and expertise to verify all information they need". 

Here is an example of the 404 Error from a recent White Paper by TurnItIn:

 

 

Plagiarism has been a topic of a number of recent studies.  One such study, conducted by the National Science Foundation in 2013, reported they investigated over 100 plagiarism cases in a year for those manuscripts submitted to their journals; about 15% of these were 404 Errors (Masic, 2014).

This phenomenon certainly is not limited to academic or scientific information; it can be extended to verbal information as well.  In a recent presidential debate, Carly Fiorina cited an anti-abortion video that depicts “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain'." 

The problem: this video does not exist.

There are a number of different programs available that can check for written plagiarism, including the 404 Error.  Here are links to a couple:

• TurnitIn
• iThenticate
• Plagiarism Detector
• Duplichecker (a free, online checker)

For further reading, this Wikipedia entry lists incidents of 404 Error plagiarism as well as other forms, throughout history.  References are included, but I did not check them all!  ;)

Are 404 Errors always intentional misinformation?  No.  

This may be my favorite fun example of a non-malicious 404 Error.  This creative story, titled "History of a Victorian Era Robot" provides a detailed account, fully referenced, of (non-existent) Victorian Robots (Boilerplate).  In reality, it is the background for a comic book series.  From checking out the professional looking site, it is hard to discern that when taken at "face value".  It is easy to see how this inaccurate, yet cited, information could turn up in reports or academic manuscripts.  There are even photos to offer further support, like this one of Boilerplate in the Spanish American War:

 

In some cases, it can be a simple case of using an URL as a reference.  If that website then gets reorganized or the URL no longer functions, it will show up as a 404 Error.  What is important is that although this may be unintentional, the URL is not a permanent identifier (Singh, 2015).  If the citation can't be found, the information can't be verified.

This recent New York Times article about understanding plagiarism in the digital age gives some good examples of plagiarism as well as information on how to teach methods to avoid inadvertent plagiarism to students.

Questions to consider:
1. What techniques for verifying the accuracy of information that we have looked at so far could work for determining 404 Errors?

2. Can you think of an example of this type of inaccurate information in current events?

3. Have you ever suspected a piece of information of this type of misinformation?

4. Do you think plagiarism, specifically 404 Errors, are more prevalent now, or simply easier to detect?
 
5. Can you think of a better way to permanently link to URLS to avoid unintentional 404 Errors? 

6.  What other examples are there for 404 Errors that may lead to unintentionally inaccurate information?

 

 

References:

1. Boilerplate (2015).  http://www.bigredhair.com/boilerplate/intro.html 
2. Masic, I. (2014). Plagiarism in scientific research and publications and how to prevent it. Materia socio-medica, 26(2), 141.
3. MSNBC.  (2015).  Fiorina Defends Citing Nonexistent Abortion Video.  http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/fiorina-defends-citing-nonexistent-abortion-video
4. New York Times (2015). Skills and Strategies: Understanding Plagiarism in the Digital Age.  http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/skills-and-strategies-understanding-plagiarism-in-a-digital-age/?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=
5. Singh, B. P., Ram, M., & Satsangi, A. K. (2015). Plagiarism Detection Service: Its Benefits and Challenges for Academicians and Researchers. Transforming Dimension of IPR: Challenges for New Age Libraries, 227.
6. TurnItIn.  (2015). Examples of Plagiarism.  http://www.citadel.edu/root/images/Plagiarism/examples-from-turnitin.pdf
7. Wikipedia. (2015).  List of Plagiarism Incidents  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_plagiarism_incidents