Plagiarizing from Wikipedia?

[Via Retraction Watch.] This retraction notice made me go, "WTF were you folks thinking?" [see below for a quick comparison].

That the authors are from IIT-K -- who really, really ought to know better -- makes it even more damning. FWIW, the paper continues to be listed among the publications of Prof. Ashok Kumar, the corresponding author.

This is the first time I have come across IIT researchers being implicated in a plagiarism case. Let's see how the institutional mechanisms at IIT-K deal with this case.

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Here's the text of the retraction notice:

This article has been retracted. Please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).

Reason: This article has been retracted at the request of the editor as the authors have plagiarised part of several papers that had already appeared in several journals. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and we apologise to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.

From a limited, non-exhaustive check of the text, several elements of the text had been plagiarised from the following list of sources:

Dihydroxyacetone - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

StateMaster - Encyclopedia: Dihydroxyacetone

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From a quick scan, I found this section in the paper

... In the 1950s, Eva Wittgenstein at the University of Cincinnati did further research with dihydroxyacetone. Her studies involved using dihydroxyacetone as an oral drug for treating children with glycogen storage disease (Wittgenstein and Berry, 1960). The children received large oral doses of dihydroxyacetone, and sometimes spit or spilled the substance onto their skin. Healthcare workers noticed that the skin turned brown after a few hours of dihydroxyacetone exposure. Eva Wittgenstein continued to experiment with this unique substance, painting dihydroxyacetone liquid solutions onto her own skin. She was able to consistently reproduce the pigmentation effect, and noted that dihydroxyacetone did not penetrate beyond the stratum corneum, or dead skin surface layer.

which is very similar to this section in the Wikipedia entry:

In the 1950s Eva Wittgenstein at the University of Cincinnati did further research with dihydroxyacetone.[4][5][6][7] Her studies involved using DHA as an oral drug for assisting children with glycogen storage disease. The children received large doses of DHA by mouth, and sometimes spat or spilled the substance onto their skin. Healthcare workers noticed that the skin turned brown after a few hours of DHA exposure.

Eva Wittgenstein continued to experiment with this unique substance, painting DHA liquid solutions onto her own skin. She was able to consistently reproduce the pigmentation effect, and noted that DHA did not penetrate beyond the stratum corneum, or dead skin surface layer.

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Here is a partial list of recent misconduct cases from India: NCCS, Anna University, Kakatiya University, SVU, NIT-K.

The NCCS case went through many investigations; a high level committee is rumoured to have resolved the case in favour of the authors of a retracted paper, but its report has not been made public. In the Anna University case, the verdict went the other way, with the authors receiving different levels of punishment. There has been no news in the other cases about whether the institution even launched an official investigation.