What's this than?

Here's a tatty old headline. It's from Susan Polgar's blog.

There's more to it, though, than just a careless, casual, misspelling. It's careless all right. But the reason it's happened is anything but casual.

The reason for the error in the headline is that it's taken from the text, where the same error occurs.

Mind you, I say "the text", but it rather depends which text you mean, because like many articles on Ms Polgar's blog, this one is taken in its entirety from somewhere else entirely. In this instance, the "somewhere else" is the Telegraph, in which the piece appeared last Thursday.

As it happens, though, if you look at the paragraph in the Telegraph, you won't find any "then". In fact it doesn't say

fewer then one per cent of all chess grandmasters are female

but rather

only two per cent of all chess grandmasters are female

instead.

More than that, if you click on the respective links embedded in the stories, the Polgar version has this (which is a load of old rubbish) whereas the Telegraph version has this (which is rather better).

How can this be?

Well the reason is that, having seen the error in the original and having been informed (by Jack Rudd) that the fewer-than-one-per-cent claim was wrong, a source close to the present writer contacted the Telegraph writer who amended the story accordingly. First, the errant "then" was removed

then the "fewer than one per cent" was replaced by a more accurate claim and the rubbishy link (with its repetition of the 605 million nonsense) was replaced by the FIDE page.

And everybody lived happily ever after, albeit in a world of sizable gender imbalances.

Except that back at the Polgar blog, nothing's changed. It still has not just the semi-literate headline, but the error in the text, the error in calculation and the unreliable link.

This is because it doesn't check anything. It just scoops everything up and puts it on the blog. It doesn't check for errors. It doesn't give a stuff about accuracy. It just scoops it up and shovels it on.

If the Polgar blog was a proper site, what you might have is a short piece on the subject of girls' under-representation in chess, illustrated by some quotes from the original story, to which there would be a rather more prominent link than in fact there is.

It'd also check for accuracy. It wouldn't just copy out a blatant error in the piece and use it as a headline.

But it did, because it doesn't do any of the things it should. It just scoops everything up and shovels it on.

When I say that although it's careless, it isn't casual, I mean that it's due to the policy, the operational practice, of the blog. Much of it is essentially a content-scraping operation. Often it reproduces articles in full, unchecked, rather than writing its own pieces with links to the originals, because basically it doesn't want you to read, or pass on, the original story from the original journalist in the original source. It wants you to read the whole story on Susan Polgar's blog instead. And chances are that if you pass it on, you pass on the blog's own link.

So it's not just about some semi-literate English, or some uncorrected errors in a borrowed piece, though inattention to accuracy is a Polgar trademark.

It's about the sheer extent to which Susan Polgar uses other sites' material on her own site. It's about how she uses other people's work to promote herself.

There's a few ethical questions piling up about Susan Polgar. This is another one.