Bay Area woman paid to write county history book reportedly plagiarized from Wikipedia, SF news outl [View all]
A Bay Area government employee commissioned to write an exorbitantly expensive Santa Clara County government history book is under fire after the Mercury News found a significant portion of the manuscript was plagiarized from multiple sources, including its own publication, Wikipedia, SFGATE, the History Channel, the Washington Post and a number of other local and national news outlets.
Jean McCorquodale, the president of McCorquodale Corporation and the wife of former county supervisor and state Sen. Dan McCorquodale, has been working for the county since 1995. Her duties included completing grant applications and related tasks before she became the county’s sole grant writer from 2009 to 2014, the Mercury News reported. Her contract was then renewed and she was tasked with the history book project in 2018, an undertaking that was delayed by two years. The county has reportedly paid her at least $2.45 million since 2009.
After the 580-page manuscript was finally submitted by Jean McCorquodale last January, the Mercury News found that many excerpts were allegedly copied word-for-word from the websites she was drawing her research from, including a section from the Wikipedia page for politician Jonathan D. Stevenson, a paragraph from a History Channel article about the Spanish-American War’s Treaty of Paris and segments from another page on the Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation website.
The Santa Clara County Executive Office, which is conducting an investigation of the incident, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from SFGATE. But county executive Jeff Smith told the Mercury News he was “shocked” and “very concerned” to discover that passages from the draft submitted by McCorquodale were nearly identical to the source material.
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Jean-McCorquodale-plagiarizes-Bay-Area-book-17221009.php
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