When Freelancers Plagiarize Dummies

DIY table saw stand

Yesterday's DotD was one example of a freelancer who'd gotten his "information" from someone else's freelanced work; today's is another in the same vein. This time it's some anonymous drone from HowStuffWorks.com who baldly plagiarized the work of another anonymous drone at DoItYourself.com The project they both punted on was a relatively simple one, "How to Build a Table Saw Stand." Sadly, neither author had the courage to sign their work, so we're let to add yet another to the scrap heap of Anonymous rubbish.

The two sets of plans are identical, although Anonymous, Jr., reworded the rubbish s/he copied from DIY. Junior opened by suggesting why someone might need a table:

Router Bits for Woodworking Dummies

straight router bit

The staff of the Antisocial Network would much rather be able to point to a specific name (or pseudonym) when it comes time to award our DotDs, mostly because it's just not very satisfying to point to some anonymous drone as the source of internet stupidification. Once in a while, however, we come across content so mind-numbingly dumb that we just can't resist... So, meet the Anonymous HowStuffWorks.com contributor who inflicted "Are there router bits for a drill?" on the 'net.

According to anonymous (no name is associated with this dreck in any archived version of the post),

Dating Fossils for the Dummy Geology Student

We aren't quite sure how the site that calls itself HowStuffWorks.com works, but our staffers suspect that the site may have started out as an eHow-style content farm that subsequently tried to recast itself as an authority on everything (not unlike WiseGEEK.com). You can (usually) tell at which stage in the site's evolution a post was written: if there's a byline, it's meant to be authoritative; if written by a "contributor," it's from the eHow-style era. Unfortunately, some of the long and involved posts with bylines are... less than authoritative. Here's one of them, Tracy V. Wilson and her take on "How Do Scientists Determine the Age of Dinosaur Bones?"

Your Very Own Workbench for Dummy Woodworkers

If you haven't seen the row of clickbait photos spread across the bottom of about 70% of the web pages you access in a day, you must not be paying attention. We mean the ones that advertise crap like, "She had no idea why they were staring," or "You won't believe what [name of celebrity] looks like now!" Of course, if you click on one, you'll find an endless string of stock photos copiously wallpapered with popups and other ads. In other words, bait and switch. You wanted to see what Markie Post or Donny Osmond looks like today, but what you got was 63 unrelated photos! Well, freelancers bait and switch, too, especially when they're basically ignorant of their topic; like HowStuffWorks.com contributor Elizabeth Abbess and her post, "How to Make a Workbench."

Gas Wells for Dummies (HSW Week 7)

Natural gas wellhead

It stands to reason that some content-farm freelancers are competent, at least in the areas where they have expertise. We have no one on staff who's qualified to argue with an M.D. about drug interactions or with an experienced welder about the difference between TIG and MIG welding. HSW's Jamie Page Deaton seems to be one such competent freelancer when it comes to automotive questions. Her problem today, though, is that she apparently knows little or nothing about "How does natural gas drilling work?" but wrote the article anyway.

Maybe because "gas" was in the title? Who knows...

A Router Table for Woodworking Dummies

shop-built router table

A couple of times early in the Antisocial Network's crusade to stamp out greedy freelancer stupidity we ran across near-duplicate posts. We assumed that happened because of poor quality control at content farms like Seekyt and Bubblews, which is where we'd found previous duplicates.¹ We didn't expect to find such duplication at a site that prides itself on being a "source of unbiased, reliable, easy-to-understand answers and explanations of how the world actually works" – but there it was at HowStuffWorks.com. A post by an Anonymous "contributor" called "How to Build a Router Table."

Magma for Dummy Liberal Arts Majors (HSW Week 5)

Magma generation in subduction zones

Welcome to HowStuffWorks week, where we call out seven freelancers who seem to have sold their intellectual souls for a handful of royalties... or perhaps a stipend: we aren't sure how HSW pays. Whatever the case, we sent our staffers to the site to look for bogosity and dumbassery, and we found more than enough to fill out a week. Here's today's example, Tracy V. Wilson and her cockamamie attempt to answer the equally cockamamie question, "Will we ever run out of magma?"

Router Bits for Dummy Woodworkers (HSW Week 4)

Router bit profiles

Once again, we've decided to focus on just one page of the five in a HowStuffWorks.com article, mostly because none of the staff wanted to read the entire thing. Well, that, and the 300-some words Elizabeth Abbess plugged into page two of her article, "How to Choose Router Bits: Common Types of Router Bits" were all anyone around these parts needed to read to know that she simply had no idea what she was talking about.

Whatever the case, Abbess (like most HSW bylines, it seems to be a nom de plume) found herself some handy lists of router bit profiles to mine – except that the word "profile" didn't show up Elizabeth's list. Of course, she couldn't just reproduce the list, 'cause that would get her hand slapped for plagiarism. The results, however, of her copy-reword-paste job were rather amusing.

Attic Vents for Dummies (HSW Week 3)

roof vent with flashing

It's only the third day into HowStuffWorks week, but the staffers are already complaining about the number of page clicks that site requires for you to read an entire article. They've also noticed that many of the shorter (and more stupidified) articles seem to be credited to "contributors" or "editors" instead of individuals. That being said, it's still pretty easy to come across crud on the website – crud like "How do I install attic vents?"; a topic that Vivien Bullen attempted to address for HowStuffWorks.com.

Clipless Pedals for Dummy Cyclists (HSW Week 2)

cycling shoe and clipless pedal

One feature of HowStuffWorks.com that our Antisocial Network staffers have noticed is that articles are broken into chunks a few hundred words long. We figure there are several reasons for this: the pages show up separately in search results and the individual pages generate more ad hits, for instance. We don’t want to our readers to have to wade through four pages of freelance twaddle, though, so we’re fine with handing Brian Boone an award just on the basis of page two of his article, “How Pedaling Technique Works: Clipless Pedaling Techniques.”

Oil Reservoir Depth for Dummies (HSW Week 1)

Depth of petroleum generation

It's been a while since we featured a site for a week, but since we figured out that much of HowStuffWorks.com is actually written by freelancers with journalism degrees, we've been itching to look at them more closely. So, welcome to HowStuffWorks week...

You've certainly heard someone say to a friend or coworker, "It's on your right. No, your other right!" Even well into adulthood, people still sometimes get simple things like right and left confused. It's no wonder, then, that content-farm freelancers who've picked topics with which they have only a vague familiarity (if any) are going to make some mistakes – sometimes pretty serious mistakes. With that in mind, we submit for your consideration a HowStuffWorks post by Alice Truong, allegedly written to address the question, "How far underground are oil deposits?"

Drilling an Oil Well, the Dummy Version

oilfield drill bit

In the midst of fact-checking a recent post on oil rigs, we ran across a link to a post on HowStuffWorks.com. We respect David Macaulay, so we sort of figured that a website riffing on the title of his most famous work would be authoritative. Boy, were we wrong! We sent our chief petroleum geologist to read through "The Oil Drilling Process Explained" by David DeFranza, and the poor guy almost ralphed up his breakfast. So much for having four college degrees!