“When they appear with the same clues, that looks suspicious. “When the same theme answers appear in the same order from one publication to the next, that makes you look closer,” Shortz tells Eli Rosenberg for the New York Times. While longtime New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz says he expects crossword puzzles to sometimes share themes and answers, he was surprised by what the number of similarities between puzzles that Parker edited. This scandal is causing a stir among crossword makers and fans alike, many of whom see puzzlemaking as an art form. Most of those have been republished under fake author names.” “Hundreds more of the puzzles edited by Parker are nearly verbatim copies of previous puzzles that Parker also edited. “The puzzles in question repeated themes, answers, grids and clues from Times puzzles published years earlier,” Roeder writes. As FiveThirtyEight’s Oliver Roeder reports, an analysis of a massive crossword puzzle database maintained by a software engineer revealed that 1,537 puzzles that Parker edited for Universal and USA Today were at least 75 percent similar to previously published puzzles, and more than 60 copied elements from New York Times' crossword puzzles. The puzzle maker at the center of the story is Timothy Parker, who edits crossword puzzles for Universal Uclick, a company that produces puzzles for hundreds of newspapers and magazines around the country, including USA Today and Smithsonian Magazine. Now, thanks to some detective work and a database containing decades of crosswords, a group of puzzle-makers say one of the country’s most prominent crossword editors may have plagiarized answers and themes in more than 1,500 puzzles over the last 20 years. Needless to say, copying another person’s puzzle is a serious taboo. Making a crossword puzzle isn’t easy: crossword puzzle makers, or cruciverbalists, have to follow strict rules in building their brain teasers.
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