Friday, July 25, 2008

More Plagiarism at KLRVU

We have already pointed out that KLRVU has plagiarized a page of SurveyUSA and compared the two pages, with images of the opening paragraphs. The rest of the page is much the same--a rip-off of the SurveyUSA page, with minor changes.

But copying-and-pasting material and revising it for a new location is often trickier than one would assume, as can be seen in the section where KLRVu explains how it got your number.

What they found at SurveyUSA was this:
    SurveyUSA.2
Here they found a problem, because their phone list did not come from SSI.

    KLRVUPlagiarism.2
Here again, we see a few more changes. Most importantly, SSI is replaced by a Canadian company, Infolist Canada. Like SSI, Infolist Canada is described as the largest and most respected provider of data. But this is surely incorrect, since (as SurveyUSA tells us, SSI is the largest). Indeed, Infolist seems literally to have no public profile: no webpage, no phone number, no nothing.

It is hard to say exactly what is going on here. Is this incompentence, laziness, or dishonesty? Probably a little of all three.