In light of how embattled Jackson was by the media and forgotten by the public until recently, it's interesting to see how his death has changed the discussion - words like 'freak' and 'pedophile' replaced with 'genius' and 'work ethic'.
I'd like to see a similar study conducted on frequenters of HN and Reddit. If the study is correct, there should be a correlation between grumpiness and higher karma on these sites too.
Let's not pretend that 'experts' are supposed to know everything. If you went for a programming interview and were rejected because you didn't have all of the regex syntax on the tip of your tongue, would you feel the same way? I don't think it indicates a lack of knowledge or laziness. It's just an acknowledgment of the central role that Wikipedia plays in research these days combined with the ease of copy-paste functionality in word processing systems. Had the same thing happened twenty years ago with the Encyclopedia Britannica that might be a different story. But Anderson intended to rework the sections he copied and forgot to. Sloppy work, yes, but it's so easy to see how someone could make this mistake innocently.