Irishgamer.ie reviewer removed

A reviewer at a new Irish games website, Irishgamer.ie, has been removed from his position, as well as his reviews removed, following revelation that some of this writings were ‘lifted’ from the UK games magazine ‘Games TM’.

The actions of the reviewer are thought to have been carried out with out the knowledge of the editor.

After ‘zabbo’ a user on Boards.ie posted about two identical review sentences, the Irishgamer.ie editor swiftly unpublished the review written by Dave White, and later all of White's reviews. The issue is said to be resolved with the editor of GamesTM.

“I was glad to see the whole issue sorted out so quickly. The problem was fully resolved with GamesTM as the alleged plagarism only concerned two lines of one review”, Noel Brady, editor Irishgamer.ie told Games Toaster tonight.

Continuing he stated “That said, the site has only launched and we don't want to take any chances with bad publicity. The reviewer will not be writing any more articles for the site and we hope that people will continue to enjoy the excellent service we offer. Already people on the thread on [boards.ie] have commented about how they feel the site is fulfilling a niche as the one Irish site which is updated on a day-to-day basis. All the positive feedback we have received is superb".

Of course, there is the problem that some journalist (paid or unpaid) may have misguided moral compasses, however, plagiarism on this level can be an editor’s nightmare. Problems of this kind have occurred at long established print publications so it is understandably difficult for small websites to screen their writers.

Comments

The original review had the irishgamer site owners name as the author, something slightly overlooked. Although Noel Brady did claim that there was a mistake when 'uploading' the review, it all seems rather dubious. And perhaps slightly desperate. An attempt to churn out content ?

It was also rumoured that Noel Brady offered extra games in an attempt to get 'zabbo' to remove his posts from the thread.

[Noel Brady]

There was a mistake when uploading the review and our moderating team will verify this. Several reviews had no authors and in the rush to get them online my name was used because I had e-mailed them all to the updating team.

I e-mailed them though because I am Main Editor and edit all newspieces, previews, reviews and any other type of article that go on the site. That actually leaves me with very little time to write articles myself which is why the reviewing team complete most of the reviews.

As for rumours, they are a wonderful thing. Only a week ago the IG team were accused of sending out an e-mail saying XboxIreland had closed. Of course this rumour turned out to be untrue as are many other rumours.

We've actually recently relaunched our reviews so perhaps you'll like the new layout. They are now going to be shorter and, seeing as we've taken down all the reviews that were in the older layout, I strongly doubt we are only interested in churning out content.

By the way, I am Main Editor and one of three people who own the site. Andrew Darcy of www.custompc.ie and Eoin Stanley of www.eoinstanley.com are joint owners so I am not the site owner.

I hope that clears things up.