“All news that’s fit to print” apparently now includes Wikipedia entries.
New York Times journalist Carol Vogel was accused of copying sentences from a Wikipedia entry in her article, “A Renaissance Master Finally Gets a Showcase.” The fourth paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on artist Cosimo Roselli holds too many similarities to the lede of Vogel’s July 24 piece, Gawker reported.
While some of the wording between the two passages is different, the basic structure remains the same.
During his lifetime, Cosimo acquired a reputation for eccentricity — a reputation enhanced and exaggerated by later commentators such as Giorgio Vasari, who included a biography of Piero di Cosimo in his Lives of the Artists. Reportedly, he was frightened of thunderstorms, and so pyrophobic that he rarely cooked his food; he lived largely on hard-boiled eggs, which he prepared 50 at a time while boiling glue for his artworks. He also resisted any cleaning of his studio, or trimming of the fruit trees of his orchard; he lived, wrote Vasari, “more like a beast than a man.”
Artists can be eccentric, but the quirks of the Italian Renaissance master Piero di Cosimo are legendary. He is said to have been terrified of thunderstorms and so pyrophobic that he rarely cooked his food, subsisting mostly on hard-boiled eggs that he prepared 50 at a time while heating glue for his art. He didn’t clean his studio. He didn’t trim the trees in his orchard. Giorgio Vasari, the Renaissance biographer, described Piero as living “more like a beast than a man.”
The New York Times is reportedly “aware of the situation” and “looking into it.” As of July 29, the Times has not changed the contents of the article.
