There's no beginning and there is no end  

Malcolm Gladwell's piece in the New Yorker about a very personal act of plagiarism (long) is possibly the best article on intellectual property that I've ever read. Not to steal (!) his thunder, but there's a fair bit of nuance in his eventual position, and some surprisingly sympathetic writing about a woman who lifted her words from one of his own articles. This level of perspective in a writer is pretty rare, I think. (I was tempted, as I'm sure you were, to republish the entire article in my own name -- ie without attribution -- but who knows if Mr. Galdwell's editors at the New Yorker are as englightened as he is? And besides, when I've engaged in this kind of meta-plagiary in the past, it's passed unnoticed...)

Somehow related is this piece of anti-Wikipedia invective from a former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, who signs off by comparing the Wikipedia to what you'd read in a public restroom. The nice thing about public restrooms, of course, is that they're public. My own experience with Wikipedia is that the entries are about as authoritive as anything you can find on the internet for free, and they have the added benefit of being editable by me. This kind of productive interface between knowledge and social consciousness is what makes the Wikipedia so valuable. Is a participatory theory of knowledge anti-intellectual? Or should this guy get off his ass and fix the inaccuracies he reads?

Note that Britannica makes no mention of the Ol' Dirty Bastard, while Wikipedia has an extensive, well referenced article. I guess the ODB wouldn't have been surprised by this.