'Data Geek' Unearths Epic Plagiarism Case That Shakes The Crossword Community [2016]

[Yithian]

Back in 2016, a statistics and coding obsessive, fantastically named Saul Pwanson, waded into the data produced by a group of several hundred crossword enthusiasts ('The Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project', led by David Steinberg), who over three years had assembled transcriptions of every New York Times Crossword Puzzle that had ever been published. A slightly obsessive streak led him to 'scrape' the data from their site (direct access was refused) and reassemble the essence of their transcriptions in a perfectly organised format that would allow him to interrogate the data more thoroughly. With that accomplished, additional data sets were assimilated and clear patterns began to emerge.

From there it snowballed.

This video is very good, but the layman may be lost in the technical jargon. If the subject matter sounds dry, rest assured he's quite witty and engaging.

Here's an article aimed at non-experts:

A Plagiarism Scandal Is Unfolding In The Crossword World
By Oliver Roeder
Filed under Crossword Puzzles
Published Mar. 4, 2016

A group of eagle-eyed puzzlers, using digital tools, has uncovered a pattern of copying in the professional crossword-puzzle world that has led to accusations of plagiarism and false identity.

Since 1999, Timothy Parker, editor of one of the nation’s most widely syndicated crosswords, has edited more than 60 individual puzzles that copy elements from New York Times puzzles, often with pseudonyms for bylines, a new database has helped reveal. The puzzles in question repeated themes, answers, grids and clues from Times puzzles published years earlier. Hundreds more of the puzzles edited by Parker are nearly verbatim copies of previous puzzles that Parker also edited. Most of those have been republished under fake author names.

Nearly all this replication was found in two crosswords series edited by Parker: the USA Today Crossword and the syndicated Universal Crossword. (The copyright to both puzzles is held by Universal Uclick, which grew out of the former Universal Press Syndicate and calls itself “the leading distributor of daily puzzle and word games.”) USA Today is one of the country’s highest-circulation newspapers, and the Universal Crossword is syndicated to hundreds of newspapers and websites.

On Friday, a publicity coordinator for Universal Uclick, Julie Halper, said the company declined to comment on the allegations. FiveThirtyEight reached out to USA Today for comment several times but received no response.

Continued at length:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-plagiarism-scandal-is-unfolding-in-the-crossword-world/

 

[Yithian]

And here's an essay that focuses more on the fallout and the exit of Timothy Parker (I'm not a fan of Slate, but 'cruciverbal malfeasance' is a great turn of phrase given the context):

A Case of Cruciverbal Coincidence, Carelessness, or The Great #Gridgate Scandal?​

Wendy Warren Austin​

​

If you’ve ever done a USA Today crossword puzzle, it is highly likely you have come across one of Timothy Parker’s creations. That is, up until last spring. In the March 4, 2016, issue of ESPN’s online magazine, FiveThirtyEight, senior editor Oliver Roeder broke the story of a developing “plagiarism scandal” involving the replication of crossword puzzle themes (Roeder).​

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Here’s what went down: Timothy Parker was the crossword puzzle editor for USA Today from 2003 to 2016 (13 years), and Universal uClick for 15 years. Computer coder Saul Pwanson* was assembling a huge database of about 52,000 crossword puzzles, going as far back to 1942 with The New York Times puzzles, and collecting ones from the LA Times from 1996.While collecting them, he also tasked the computer to group puzzles similar to each other. Pwanson says that “when you get the data into a nice, clean, dense form, stuff just falls out of it” (Fisher). Immediately, he connected with Will Shortz who edits The New York Times crosswords. Shortz’s opinion: “It’s an obvious case of plagiarism.”​

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The controversy, quickly dubbed #gridgate on Twitter, spread rapidly among the crossword puzzle creator community, and after a short delay, Parker and USA Today parted ways. On Twitter, “#gridgate” was referred to on Twitter as a “horrible scandal,” Slate called it “cruciverbal malfeasance” (Gaffney) at one point, “puzzle identity theft,” at another. The editor of the American Values Club thought it was a “gross violation” (Tausig).​

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Continued:​

https://prod-ncte-cdn.azureedge.net/nctefiles/groups/cccc/committees/ip/2016/austin.pdf​

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And here's the technical analysis cited throughout that essay:

​

How to Spot a Plagiarized Crossword​

A crossword constructor explains the puzzle scandal.​

By MATT GAFFNEY​

MARCH 10, 20163:09 PM​

[...]​

​

[The] investigation into Parker’s work shouldn’t take very long. As a professional crossword constructor, it is extremely hard for me to believe that what happened here is a mere coincidence.​

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Building on Roeder’s work, let’s drill down further into Parker’s main defense, which is that crossword puzzle themes sometimes do get innocently repeated.​

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This is absolutely true, as I discussed in a Slate piece in 2009 after I wrote a crossword whose theme entries all embedded the word RAVEN—a theme someone else had used a few months prior. But that doesn’t appear to be what’s happening with the Parker puzzles.​

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To understand why, I’ll run through some examples that I’ve rated on a “Crossword Suspicion Scale.” A puzzle that looks to be innocently duplicated will be a 1 on our scale. One that appears to be straight up plagiarized will rate a 10.​

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Analysis follows with many visual examples:​

https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/03/how-to-spot-a-plagiarized-crossword.html​

 

[Frideswide]

I hope that these really /are/ different people? rather than being Mr T Parker's pseudonyms?

 

[Shady]

WTF, example of 'Shady' ? Not me

 

[Yithian]

WTF, example of 'Shady' ? Not me

One of the analyses divides the 'problematic' puzzles into 'shoddy' and 'shady', the former likely down to laziness and the latter clearly deliberately copied.

I am happy to take your claim that you were not personally involved at face value.

 

[Mikefule]

​

Analysis follows with many visual examples:​

https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/03/how-to-spot-a-plagiarized-crossword.html​

A genuinely interesting article. I had not realised there was so much ritual and convention involved in designing crosswords. It's almost like a poem or a symphony in terms of theme and complexity.

However, when I read,

<<As a professional crossword constructor, it is extremely hard for me to believe that what happened here is a mere coincidence.>>

I immediately thought two things, in reverse order to the quotation:

1. "I find it hard to believe," in almost any context, says more about the person saying it than it does about the issue they are struggling to believe. It is not a statement about the inherent credibility of the phenomenon under discussion, but about the commentator's own opinion. For comparison, if someone said, "I find it easy to believe in fairies," or, "I find it hard to believe that a Muslim can be a patriotic American," it would not influence my own assessment. (Fairies are unlikely to exist; Muslims can be patriotic just like any other religious group.)
2. However, there is a specific context in which "I find it hard to believe..." may carry some weight — which is when someone is talking about their own area of expertise. This person is a professional crossword constructor, which at first sight seems to be the relevant field of expertise. However, suggest that without a thorough grounding in statistical analysis, they have only part of the expertise required, and that their own perception of probability may be biased. This is suggested by their use of "... in 99% of cases..." which is one of those common examples of pseudo statistics. At best, they mean "usually" or "nearly always".

My third objection to the article is their introduction of an entirely spurious scale of 1 to 10, and then ranking examples as if there was some form of mathematical precision to this.

That said, it's an interesting and reasonably balanced article and, while I am in no position to comment on the probabilities, it makes a compelling case that the more extreme examples are plagiarism.

Thanks for posting it. I enjoyed reading it.

 

[dr wu]

Wow.....a scandal in the crossword community.......how horrific.

 

[Mythopoeika]

Cross words will be exchanged, swords will be crossed, and nobody will have a clue.