Woman Copied Wikipedia for History Book She Was Paid Millions to Write: Report

The wife of a former California state senator has been accused of extensive plagiarism after a Bay Area news organization found that approximately one-fifth of a manuscript she’d been paid millions to write had been lifted nearly verbatim from other sources. The book project on Santa Clara County history, The Mercury News reported Sunday, has been put “on hold” by officials after the outlet raised questions about author Jean McCorquodale’s writing. McCorquodale was paid at least $2.45 million between 2009 and 2019 to write grant applications and pen the book, according to a Mercury News report last week. Her 580-page manuscript, which reportedly fell two years behind schedule before finally being delivered in January, contained paragraphs that appeared to have been lifted wholesale from “Wikipedia, the History Channel, the Mercury News, the Washington Post, county web pages and other sources, about half of them without footnotes,” according to the News. “It’s troublesome,” County Executive Jeff Smith said earlier this week, when the outlet sent him evidence of the alleged plagiarism. In a statement to the News, McCorquodale insisted that the paragraphs under scrutiny were “placeholders and were never intended to be included in the final copy.”