“Did an Omnibus contributor lift something from Wikipedia in 2005, or did an Omnibus graduate contribute to a Wikipedia article in 2012?” Douglas Wilson

Last Thursday, May 5, 2016, at 10:56 am PST, Rachel Miller published 70+ breathtaking examples of comprehensive across-the-board plagiarism in the Omnibus homeschool textbook series, which was edited by Douglas Wilson & Ty Fischer and published by Veritas Press. Four and one-half hours later, at 3:27 pm PST, KirkCEO tweeted this:

How much do you want to bet I’m going to accuse Wikipedia of actually plagiarizing me?

— Not Doug Wilson (@KirkCEO) May 5, 2016

Sounds ridiculous, I know. But about 25 hours later, on Friday afternoon around 5 pm PST, Pastor Douglas Wilson of Christ Church, Moscow, floated this explanation for the plagiarism:

“Since Wikipedia is constantly changing, we will have a hard time determining what came from what. In other words, did an Omnibus contributor lift something from Wikipedia in 2005, or did an Omnibus graduate contribute to a Wikipedia article in 2012?”

Mr. Wilson’s question requires deconstruction: Let’s say that Rachel used current-date source material to demonstrate the Omnibus plagiarism instead of archived source material. This would mean that if an Omnibus graduate had “contributed” Omnibus content to Wikipedia as Mr. Wilson contends, then that graduate would have committed plagiarism. That is, he would have uploaded word-for-word text from all six of the copyrighted Omnibus volumes to a wide variety of open-source websites and privately owned & operated websites, without citing (i.e. footnoting) his source — namely, the Omnibus [insert lesson-well-learned joke here]. Of course, this would be a criminal act on the part of the plagiarist [insert another lesson-well-learned joke here]. The net result of Mr. Wilson’s argument would be that the various Wikis and a plethora of other websites, such as but not limited to sparknotes.com, gradesaver.com, harvard.edu, infoplease.com, amazon.com, paganspath.com, an obscure travel agency in the UK, and even the Institute for Creation Research, plagiarized from the Omnibus textbook series (edited by Douglas Wilson & Tyler Fischer).

Is this possible? I am sure that Doug Wilson believes this really happened, which is something he will have to work out if he ever recovers his grasp of reality. But in fact it’s not possible because as Rachel demonstrated, she used original source material to establish the plagiarism. That is, she found the actual websites that the plagiarists used via the Wayback Machine on archive.org.

However, the point of this post is to acknowledge Not Doug Wilson’s remarkable foresight. He predicted that Doug Wilson would accuse Wikipedia of plagiarizing him, which is exactly what Doug Wilson did, right on cue, the very next day.

@KirkCEO, you are the Nostradamus of Twitter.