6/1/2023 0 Comments Crossword editor plagiarizeIt's really, it's a lot easier to find things when you do undirected exploration of a quality and well-formed dataset than trying to do directed exploration on a difficult or ungroomed dataset. I was actually developing a thesis that proper organization of data was the key to data analysis and exploration – that if you get data into the right form, then people can run with it and they can discover things they never would have thought possible. And so I decided to take it upon myself to organize the data, to get it into a form that I could use it, and was readily downloadable and explorable. And the thing that stymied me was that there was a lot of data out there in the world, and you could see it – you can see that it's out there, but you can't access it yourself. And so I wanted to investigate, or I just wanted to gather some data and try to figure out how I could be a better crossword constructor. And I decided to try to get better at it. ![]() So I started creating them myself and wasn't very good, of course, because that's how it goes. And the more that you dive into crosswords, the crossword world, the more you realize that it's an art form. I used to do the crosswords with my grandmother and I started getting into crosswords more seriously, started making them for myself. I mean, I've liked the crosswords for a very long time. And a lot of people do crosswords, from all over the country and all over the globe, and so it went far and wide. It's like, no one's no one's really been hurt by the plagiarism of crosswords. I think that everyone loves a scandal, and especially when it's a trivial scandal, it's really easy to get behind. So there was an uproar for, probably a week or so actually, where lots of activity on Twitter, it was #gridgate. Couple of years ago, I stumbled across a crossword scandal, accidentally. I do data analysis and data tooling kind of stuff. Or at least, when you do the exploration or the investigation, you'll learn something – whether it's because there's literally something going on there, or because your processes or your own understanding of the subject matter is incorrect. If it doesn't seem right, something isn't right. ![]() The scandal got coverage in the crossword puzzle community. ![]() Having access to this data he discovered plagiarism by a major crossword editor that had gone on for years. In 2016 Saul Pwanson designed a plain-text file format for crossword puzzle data, scraping tens of thousands of crosswords from various sources. Subscribe to the RSS feed or Listen to this podcast on your preferred podcasting platform. I was willing to put months into something that any actual journalist, who's being paid, there's no way that their editor would approve them to be paid for months to do this kind of work.” “I think that it's really important that we have more independent investigators, or you call them ‘citizen investigators’, people who have the time and the space, like I did. Scandal in the crossword puzzle community. To digitise crossword puzzles into a unified format uncovered a plagiarism Saul Pwanson became an accidental investigator when his attempts
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