McCain Gets Wiki

John McCain may be a self-confessed Internet "illiterate" who doesn't know his way around "a Google." But that doesn't mean his staffers are iGnoramuses as well. In fact, judging by the latest blip to qualify as "breaking news" in these dog days of summer, Team McCain may be a little too familiar with pointing and clicking. Or cutting and pasting, as it were.

Seeking to boost his national-security cred while rival Barack Obama splashes in the Aloha State surf, McCain appeared before reporters yesterday morning to "offer a lengthy primer on Russia-Georgia crisis." It was only a matter of hours, however, before an editor of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia emailed blogger Taegan Goddard to "point out some similarities between Sen. John McCain's speech today on the crisis in Georgia and the Wikipedia article on the country Georgia." Under a rather racy headline--Did McCain Plagiarize His Speech on the Georgia Crisis?--Goddard concluded that "given the closeness of the words and sentence structure, most would consider parts of McCain's speech to be derived directly from Wikipedia. The offending lines, according to Goddard, included "one of the world's first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion," which resembled Wikipedia's original "one of the first countries in the world to adopt Christianity as an official religion," as well as the following paragraph...

After a brief period of independence following the Russian revolution, the Red Army forced Georgia to join the Soviet Union in 1922. As the Soviet Union crumbled at the end of the Cold War, Georgia regained its independence in 1991, but its early years were marked by instability, corruption, and economic crises.

... which he compared to this section from Wikipedia:

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Georgia had a brief period of independence as a Democratic Republic (1918-1921), which was terminated by the Red Army invasion of Georgia. Georgia became part of the Soviet Union in 1922 and regained its independence in 1991. Early post-Soviet years were marked by a civil unrest and economic crisis.

By this morning, the Politico's Jonathan Martin was arguing that "the claim could undermine McCain's expertise on foreign affairs—one of the campaign's cornerstones against the more inexperienced Obama."  

To borrow a phrase: "baloney."

I get what Goddard and Martin are getting at. Delivering presidential campaign speeches peppered with phrases from an online resource written by thousands of anonymous Web nerds isn't the most effective way to convey foreign-policy expertise. And even though Team McCain claims that "there are only so many ways to state basic historical facts and dates and that any similarities to Wikipedia were only coincidental," I don't doubt that whoever wrote the historical passage consulted Wikipedia for a refresher course (something that the campaign wouldn't deny "outright"). I mean, there are simply too many repeated phrases, conveniently rearranged to evade detection, to suggest anything but a schoolboy copy job.

That said, I'm not sure what the infraction has to do with McCain. As Martin reported this morning, the candidate called top speechwriter Mark Salter Sunday afternoon requesting (according to Salter's email to staff) "a little Georgian history": "Old nation. Absorbed into USSR. Independent after Cold War. Plagued by corruption. Then Rose Revolution. President U.S. educated." Most likely, some young speechwriter assigned to cook up the necessary grafs familiarized himself with an unfamiliar country on Wikipedia and then failed to excise every last trace of the encyclopedia entry in his finished product--which, after all, didn't regurgitate entire sentences or original ideas, but merely an historical chronology. That shouldn't reflect poorly on a candidate, who, like all of his political peers, simply doesn't have the time to write his own daily remarks.

Unless, of course, you suspect that McCain was surfing around Wikipedia all by himself.

Right. That's what I thought.

Although something does tell me the Arizona senator may take the next available opportunity to lecture his young aides on the virtues of Encyclopedia Britannica--the print edition.