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#Usa today crossword editor software

They are typically the longest, most creative and most important answers in the puzzle They are based on the topic of the puzzle and are what gives the puzzle its identity.

The Theme: The theme are the core answers to the puzzle.

To better understand the nature of the scandal, we first have to understand that there are two types of clues and answers in most crossword puzzles: Understanding Crossword Puzzles (and Crossword Plagiarism) Questions that will not be easy to answer, especially since the Pandora’s box of automated detection has been opened. Though he admits to posting under pseudonyms and that there is similarity between the themes of his crosswords, he said the similarities are simply caused by coincidence, not malicious plagiarism.īut despite the denial, the story has caused shockwaves through the crossword community and raised some seriously difficult questions about originality in crossword puzzles. Parker, for his part, has denied any wrongdoing. That percentage is in sharp contrast to other publishers, such as The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, both of which had less than 0.5% with such a high overlap. What he found, when he looked at all of the puzzles published since 2003, was that 5.4% of Universal puzzles and 16.0% of USA Today puzzles had greater than 25% similarity to previous puzzles.

#Usa today crossword editor software

He was able to learn about this due to a database of over 50,000 crossword puzzles compiled by software engineer Saul Pwanson, who also wrote the software for comparing the puzzles to one another to determine originality. On February 25th, Ben Tausig, the editor of the American Values Club crossword, tweeted that a crossword he wrote for USA Today in 2004 was tweaked and run again in 2008 and then again in 2015. However, that’s exactly the question facing crossword puzzle fans as a recent report by Oliver Roeder for the FiveThirtyEight blog highlights a growing plagiarism scandal in the industry.Īt the heart of the scandal sits Timothy Parker, who is both the editor of the USA Today Crossword and editor of the Universal Crossword, a heavily-syndicated crossword feature. When one thinks of plagiarism in newspapers, one usually thinks of errant journalists copying and pasting the works of others writers, not whether the crossword puzzle contains plagiarized or duplicative material.

Update: Just as this story was about to go live, I received word that Timothy Parker had stepped down, at least temporarily, from both USA Today and Universal.