[WikiEN-l] A Missing Policy

Mon Jul 18 18:42:04 UTC 2005

Maybe this is an example of how I can't find subjects on Wikipedia,
but I'd rather be proved clueless than right in this case.

I just stumbled across a copyvio notice on the article
[[1868 Expedition to Abyssinia]] which, after examining the
evidence with care, I felt was a case of an editor paraphrasing
the text of a source far enough to argue that copyright no longer
applied; however, the question whether this was plagiarism
remained.

So, attempting to be a good little editor, I began to track
down what Wikipedia's policy about plagiarism was (beyond my
assumption that it was bad), & after a good-faith search
(primarily looking at links to [[Plagiarism]] from articles in
the Wikipedia namespace -- which is where policy statements
usually live) discovered only two mentions about plagiarism:

* [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]], where it is discussed in a way to
suggest it is not a copyright violation; &
* [[Wikipedia:Your first article]], where it is mentioned
in a discussion of providing one's sources.

While this may appear to some as a case of Wikilawyering or
[[instruction creep]], I feel it is a serious omission in our
list of policies. I hope I'm not alone in saying that I don't
want to find any instances of plagiarism in Wikipedia. However,
I don't want to find this sort of thing creeping into Wikipedia
under the defense "It's not a copyright violation, it's plagiarism",
nor do I want unattributed paraphrases of sources being sent to
VfD, either speedy or regular, when a simple acknowledgement of
sources might solve the problem. And this is a case clearly
different than the "Cite sources" policy currently is, which is
intended to handle things like adding controversial material
without attributing them to a source.

It'd be nice to have some kind of Cleanup tag applied to force
the contributor to improve the language &/or supply the source
for the text -- but articles have languished on Cleanup for
months or years without being fixed.

But I'm willing to live with whatever the consensus is to
handle this problem -- even if it is to treat all suspected cases
as a copyvio. It's not that I'm asking for an easy solution here
(the issue of how much paraphrase is needed in this case clearly
pre-empts that), but a sense of what the community consensus is
when (& sadly, not "if") I have to fight this problem.

Geoff