The New York Times on the Melania Trump matter

In a post Melania Trump, Plagiarism, and How Much Does It Matter? , the New York Times quoted the Washingtonian:


The Washingtonian wrote: “According to Turnitin, a plagiarism-checking website that examines 200,000 papers a day, the likelihood that a 16-word match is ‘just a coincidence’ is less than 1 in a trillion. Melania Trump’s longest match? 23 words.”



From the Washingtonian:


To help us get a handle on how similar the speeches were, Washingtonian ran excerpts through a side-by-side plagiarism checker at Small SEO Tools.

(...)

Here’s an even more shocking statistic: According to Turnitin, a plagiarism-checking website that examines 200,000 papers day, the “likelihood that a 16-word match is ‘just a coincidence’ is less than 1 in a trillion.” Melania Trump’s longest match? 23 words.



link: https://www.washingtonian.com/2016/07/19/we-ran-melania-trumps-speech-through-a-plagiarism-checker/

The link FROM the Washingtonian To "1 in a trillion" is to Top 15 Misconceptions About Turnitin , which includes the text
Misconception 11: Matched text is likely to be completely coincidental or common knowledge.

Reality: The likelihood that a 16-word match is "just a coincidence" is less than 1 in a trillion. Turnitin also includes the ability to exclude "small matches" if the instructor wants to exclude common phrases.



See also

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/19/plagiarism-signs-education-melania-trump

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/mama-phd/plagiarism-rubric

https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2016/07/21/melania-trumps-speech-raises-larger-issues-plagiarism-essay