Announcing the election of 22 new cardinals last week, the Vatican issued a media release whose biographical information turned out to have been plagiarized from Wikipedia.

http://slatest.slate.com/posts/2012/01/09/vatican_plagarizes_wikipedia_for_cardinal_bios.html

According to this article, “Vatican spokesperson Father Federico Lombardi told the Guardian that the bios were labeled unofficial and were lifted from Wikipedia in the interest of timeliness.”

It’s time to throw in the towel on plagiarism, fellow academics. Morally, our corner-cutting students are in the very best company – and not just for their preferred source of downloads but for their preferred excuse too.