someone is copying someone, and it’s all pretty gross

August 23, 2006 in General | 12 comments

There’s an article over on abcnews that describes a man who had his twin brother growing in him for 36 years. (Uhh, eww?) But that’s not the interesting part. My buddy Zach points out the similarity of the text from the article and a related wikipedia article. First, the wikipedia article:

Fetus in fetu (or Foetus in foeto) describes an extremely rare abnormality that involves a fetus getting trapped inside of its twin. It continues to survive as a parasite even past birth by forming an umbilical cord-like structure that leeches its twin’s blood supply until it grows so large that it starts to harm the host, at which point doctors usually intervene.

And the abcnews article:

It is an extremely rare abnormality that involves a fetus getting trapped inside of its twin. The trapped fetus can survive as a parasite even past birth by forming an umbilical cord-like structure that leeches its twin’s blood supply until it grows so large that it starts to harm the host, at which point doctors usually intervene.

I wonder who came first, or of they are both taking from somewhere else. The last edit on the wikipedia page is from July of 2006. I wonder if the abcnews article is recycled from something earlier as well.

12 comments

  2. Matt Good’s avatar

    Matt Good on August 23, 2006 at 1:39 pm

    Looking at the history of the Wikipedia article I think we can discredit the possibility of both deriving from a common source.

    The text of the ABC article only shows minor modifications from the current revision of the Wikipedia article. If the text originated from an earlier source you would expect it to have all been added in its current form. However, portions of the copied text were in the original version of the Wikipedia page and later modified until they reached their current form.

    For example, the phrase about forming the “umbilical cord-like structure” was added into a previously existing sentence in December 2005:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Parasitic_twin&diff=31782678&oldid=31781467

    I’m not sure how ABC should be contacted, since it would be the responsibiliity of the copyright holders to pursue violations.

  3. Richard’s avatar

    Richard on August 23, 2006 at 1:56 pm

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Violetriga
    Wikipedia user Violetriga wrote most of the copied content in September, 2004, and the umbilical cord part was added later.

  4. no one in particular’s avatar

    no one in particular on August 23, 2006 at 2:00 pm

    If you look at this edit you see an anonymous wikipedian adding a few words to the middle of that already-existing sentence (those same few words were copied into the ABC article). So it seems likely that the wikipedia paragraph is an original and not just copied from the same source.

  5. Douglas Jardine’s avatar

    Douglas Jardine on August 23, 2006 at 2:33 pm

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Keenan_Pepper#ABCNews_appears_to_have_copied_you_today_.2823rd_August_2006.29

    Brought to the attention of Keenan Pepper, Wikipedia author, whose edit dates from 2005-12-04 20:27:06 (EST? / UTC ?), many months before the ABC article dated 23rd August 2006.

  6. Douglas Jardine’s avatar

    Douglas Jardine on August 23, 2006 at 2:54 pm

    Previous post in error.

    Original author of Foetus in Foetu paragraph is JfdWolff.

    2005-03-31T12:58:52

  7. Daniel Beck’s avatar

    Daniel Beck on August 23, 2006 at 2:56 pm

    I think they have all read “The Dark Half” from Stephen King :-).
    In it, a guy named Thad had a twin. The unborn brother was absorbed into Thad in utero and later removed from his skull when the author was a child. Then, in some way…

    Oh no, I can not tell you the rest. Read it your self ;-)
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0451167317/sr=8-1/qid=1156362964/ref=sr_1_1/102-2977538-1418523?ie=UTF8

  9. Douglas Jardine’s avatar

    Douglas Jardine on August 23, 2006 at 3:51 pm

    I’ve made the same error again — seen the ‘reversion’ from blanking to a previous article as the ‘origin’ of the paragraph.

    sorry.

    RICHARD had it right, above:

    # Richard Says:
    August 23rd, 2006 at 1:56 pm

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Violetriga
    Wikipedia user Violetriga wrote most of the copied content in September, 2004, and the umbilical cord part was added later.

  11. Violet/Riga’s avatar

    Violet/Riga on August 23, 2006 at 4:34 pm

    It wasn’t actually me that wrote it, it was a user called Emperorbma. I’ve written the history of that piece of text at:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Parasitic_twin

  12. Mark Florian’s avatar

    Mark Florian on August 23, 2006 at 7:13 pm

    From the bottom of every Wikipedia page:

    “All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.” Also, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights :

    “Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement)”

    I doubt ABC are licensing their article in such a way, and I believe there’s no link to Wikipedia. Such ‘journalists’ are a waste of space.

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