Gerónimo Vargas Aignasse
Gerónimo Vargas Aignasse is an Argentine politician, a Front for Victory member of the Argentine Chamber of Deputies representing Tucumán Province. He is the son of disappeared Peronist physicist and legislator Guillermo Vargas Aignasse.
Wikipedia plagiarism incident
On 6 May 2010, Vargas Aignasse presented a law project to increase sanctions against those who commit plagiarism. But in the project proposal, to define plagiarism, he copied 331 words from the Spanish Wikipedia article on the topic (es:plagio), without any kind of attribution. The copy-pasted text even includes square brackets from the (only partially removed) footnotes in the Wikipedia article.
It wasn't the first time that Aignasse copied text from Wikipedia into law proposals. In a proposal to prohibit barra bravas from travelling to South Africa for the World Cup, he copied 314 words from the corresponding article.
A week later the Deputy admitted in an interview with Clarín that he copied the text from Wikipedia, and that he had done it before. Nevertheless, he argued that he had no obligation to cite the source, which could be considered ironic given the fact that the Deputy's law proposal seeks, precisely, to punish those who don't cite sources.
The incident was reported in English by Techdirt.[1]
References
Sources
- Presentó un proyecto contra el plagio, plagiando a Wikipedia" by María Arce, Clarín, 16 May 2010, page 18