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Sarkozy's Party in Wikipedia Plagiarism Embarrassment Over Assyrian Genocide Bill
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Lawmakers from Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP party copied and pasted parts of a bill from Wikipedia (FRANCOIS GUILLOT/AFP/Getty Images).
Wikipedia turned from useful source of information to source of embarrassment for group of lawmakers with Nicolas Sarkozy's party, after it emerged that they'd plagiarised a large part of a bill from the one of the website's entries. Fourteen MPs and MEPs with the centre-right UMP party were facing ridicule, as it was revealed that entire paragraphs of a proposed legislation they put forward to the National Assembly in Paris were copied and pasted directly from the internet encyclopaedia. The lift might have gone undetected if hadn't they forgotten to remove hyperlinks from the text. Pierre Januel, a parliamentary assistant with the rival Europe Ecology - The Greens party - noticed that the bill urging France to recognise the Assyrian genocide was suspiciously rich in links to Wikipedia pages on related topics. A quick look at the free encyclopaedia's French language article on the 1915 killings of hundreds of thousands of Assyrian Christians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire revealed that the wordings of numerous paragraphs were identical. "Epic fail of Val



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