Catching up on VroniPlag Wiki

I haven't written about the work at VroniPlag Wiki for a while, so here is some of the more interesting things that happened in the past year or so:

• There were three important verdicts handed down for VroniPlag Wiki cases, all of them affirming the university decisions to rescind the doctorates in question:
• Mh: Land(?)gericht Frankfurt, verdict in June 2016 (Only reported in the FAZ)
• Ah: Verwaltungsgericht Hamburg, verdict from 24 June 2016, 2 K 2209/13
• Lm: Verwaltungsgericht Hannover, verdict vom 3 November 2016, 6 A 6114/13
• In another legal case (Ssk: Verwaltungsgericht Düsseldorf, 15 K 1920/15) as reported by the Legal Tribune Online, although the judge made it clear that the university would win its case, it still settled the case without judgement on rather strange terms: The thesis can be submitted to another university, but not Düsseldorf again.
• In March 2016 the Medical University of Hanover determined that the current German Minister of Defense had plagiarized, but not enough to warrant rescinding the doctorate (discussed on this blog previously). A number of attempts have been undertaken in order to obtain information on which documented fragments were considered plagiarism and which ones were not, but I keep hitting a brick wall here, although it would be useful for the scientific community to know why specific fragments were considered to not be plagiarisms. The university was informed of another five dissertations (Acb, Bca, Lcg, Wfe in medicine, Cak in dentistry) and a habilitation (Mjm) that also include extensive text parallels that could be construed as plagiarism, but there has been no public progress made to date.
• The University of Münster, with 23 cases in medicine alone,  announced in February 2017 that they have completed their investigation that took 3 years and 12 meetings of the committee. The Westfälische Nachrichten report that eight doctoral degrees have been withdrawn and 14 persons reprimanded, although the university won't say which degrees have been withdrawn. One author has died, and thus that investigation was discontinued. One doctoral advisor of two of the withdrawn degrees, according to the paper,  has been stripped of additional funding and personell and is prohibited from taking on doctoral students. The story was picked up by dpa and published in a number of online publications, for example Spiegel Online.
• The often-heard argument that natural scientists don't plagiarize can be considered refuted with this doctoral thesis in chemistry that contains text overlap on over 90 % of the pages: Ry
• A law dissertation from the University of Bremen, Mra, that was published in 2016, was documented with extensive plagiarism from, among other sources, the Wikipedia.
• The documentations published for two habilitations, Chg (law, 2005) and Ank (dentistry, 1999), bring the total number of documented habilitations to eleven cases.
• One dissertation, Gma, about TV game shows such as Who wants to be a Millionaire?, copied extensively from at least 13 Wikipedia lemmata.
• One of the cases published in February 2017, Pak, includes not only text from five Wikipedia articles, but preserves the links from the articles as underlines in the text.

http://edoc.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13061/, Med. Diss. LMU München, p. 18-19

I will be speaking with a colleague in March at a conference about the Dr. Wikipedia phenomenon.