Source:
Spiegel Online InternationalGerman Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg announced on Friday that he was temporarily dropping the "doctor."
German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg said on Friday he would temporarily relinquish his "doctor" title in the wake of accusations that he plagiarized entire passages of his dissertation. But his attempts to deflate the growing scandal may ultimately fall short.
The Internet never sleeps. And neither, it would seem, does one of the web's newest pages. Since it went online on Thursday, the site (German only), a Wiki devoted to examining the Ph.D. dissertation of Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg for yet more instances of extensive borrowing and inadequate citation, has been overrun with contributors. As of early Friday morning, fully 76 passages had been identified as revealing uncanny similarities with previously published works.
Definitive proof of ill intent is still lacking, but one thing has become clear: accusations that Guttenberg plagiarized portions of his dissertation, first uncovered by the Süddeutsche Zeitung earlier this week, are not going away. And they could soon develop into a significant danger to the defense minister's political future.
The facts of the scandal would seem no longer to be in dispute. Large passages from Guttenberg's 2006 dissertation -- published in book form in 2009 -- were taken one-to-one from newspaper articles, presentations, journal entries and speeches without proper citation. Even the first two paragraphs of his introduction appear to have been borrowed from a 1997 article in the center-right daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Read more:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,746378,00.html
As of this posting, the count has risen to 176 pages where volunteers have identified plagiarisms, on 44.78% of all pages of the "summa cum laude" dissertation:
Here is the Wiki providing the quotes:
http://de.guttenplag.wikia.com/wiki/Plagiate