FRENCH LAWMAKER MOCKED AFTER DRAFT LAW COPIED AND PASTED FROM WIKIPEDIA
Washington Post
April 2 2015
French politician Valerie Boyer and her staff seem to like Wikipedia —
too much, maybe. Their admiration for the online encyclopedia will now
be forever documented in governmental transcripts, after the opposition
politician presented a draft law which was allegedly copied from the
platform in large part. She and her assistants didn’t even remove
Wikipedia’s footnotes, according to French newspaper Le Figaro.
On Tuesday, French media outlets exposed the plagiarism when they
analyzed the law proposal which argues that France should recognize
the Assyrian genocide during the World War I under the Ottoman Empire.
As WorldViews reported earlier, in the final days of the Ottoman
Empire, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Armenians and Assyrians were
killed. Armenians argue that the killings were committed by Turkish
soldiers, but Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has refused to
acknowledge the historical guilt.
Speaking to Le Nouvel Observateur’s Rue 89, an unnamed assistant to
Boyer confirmed the allegations: “There are only few information
on this subject, so the MP decided to overtake some wordings from
Wikipedia.” The assistant was also quoted as saying that the copied
sentences had been fact-checked before being published.
Boyer is considered an expert on the topic among French politicians —
an aspect which has raised larger questions over how much politicians
really know about the goals they pursue.
This tweet, published by an Armenian organization last month, appears
to show the MP during a commemoration of the killings in Marseille
in the south of France.
“In their haste, the delegates did not even take the time to erase
the traces of their iniquities. In their reckless and rude act of
plagiarism they even copied the links leading to the original sources
of the encyclopedia,” France’s leading center-left Le Monde newspaper
commented.
The incident has certainly shed an uncomfortable light on the
conservative UMP opposition party, headed by former president Nicolas
Sarkozy. The party had recently been shaken by a series of scandals
and internal squabbles.
Sarkozy himself acknowledged in a recent interview with Le Figaro
that his party’s “brand is a little worn off.” Last month, however,
the UMP party made unexpected gains in local elections and can now
even hope to win the 2017 presidential elections.