Better to plagiarize more reliable sources:
After Fitzgerald learned that French composer Maurice Jarre had died, he immediately went to Jarre’s Wikipedia page, inserted some fake quotations, and waited to see if they would be picked up by news organizations. His experiment worked better than he ever imagined, as evidenced by this correction from The Guardian:
Fitzgerald’s experiment might sound familiar to espionage buffs. It was a variation on the “barium meal,” a term used by the British intelligence service MI5 to describe a process used to expose a leak or a mole: different versions of similar information would be fed to several sources and then you’d wait to see which version leaked, or ended up in enemy hands. Track it back and, voila, you’ve got the culprit. Tom Clancy called it the “canary test” in his novels—or at least that’s what a Wired.com journalist wrote after reading it on this Wikipedia page. (See how it works?)
NB: most likely this story is completely made up. (That would make it an even better story right?)

3 comments
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May 11, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Paul
This story reminds me of a student in a chemistry class I TAed for that was caught plagiarizing from Wikipedia because they had simply copied and pasted the entire text onto their poster – including the [citation needed] tags.
May 12, 2009 at 1:06 pm
samson
how about a link for the story?
May 12, 2009 at 3:25 pm
jeff
oops. the link is there now.