I want to thank The Alligator for the extraordinary opportunity given to me. It is a great privilege to be allowed to write a column.
I tried to bring a different point of view to the paper, and to some extent, I believe I succeeded. I want to state this up front. I made a serious mistake. I was wrong not to give proper attribution to some material I reformulated for use in my column. I was unaware of the necessity of such a citation in this case and never had any intention of wrongdoing. I am not trying to offer any excuses, but I do believe an explanation is in order.
I was trying to write a lighthearted and casual column with the theme of taking our minds off the midterm boredom. I was trying to make the point our immediate preoccupations are small in the larger scheme of things. I selected a few comments from a large pool of reader-submitted facts in a thread at Reddit.com and reworded them to fit my column.
The title of the thread was “What’s the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?” From the title of the thread, I took it to be a sort of reference work, something like an encyclopedia of unusual facts. The title of the thread implied these facts were sourced from elsewhere. I did not view them as original material but rather as items of generally available knowledge. In several cases I had to correct the “facts” as they appeared on Reddit. The Reddit post was wrong about the length of the Wright Brothers first flight and another post misstated the location of the Voyager 1 spacecraft. I researched this material and corrected the facts before putting them in my column.
However, that did not go far enough. I wish to state again I made a serious mistake. It was carelessness on my part not to consider the necessity of a direct citation from which the facts were culled. I never had any intention of using pre-authored material as my own; I just thought I would present interesting facts to the reader. At the very least I should have given an attribution naming Reddit.com as the source of these facts.
I wish to apologize to The Alligator and its readers for this error.
Editor's note: This letter refers to this column.
