[WikiEN-l] A Missing Policy

Mon Jul 18 20:01:31 UTC 2005

Geoff Burling wrote:

>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.
>
>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.
>
The pagiarism defence is a bit like denying a murder because you were 
busy robbing a bank on the other side of town at the time of the 
murder.  I don't think that citing sources should be limited to 
controversial subjects.  I don't see much modern controversy in an 1868 
expedition, but readers should still have the opportunity to find more 
information.  In some cases you may want to know whether the information 
is real or from the contributor's imagination.  In Wiktionary this often 
takes the form of looking for verification that there really is such a 
word, especially when the word is described as some sort of sexual slang

I think that even fewer people understand the concept of plagiarism than 
understand the concept of copyright infringment.  Notwithstanding the 
numerous arguments that we have on the subject, infringement is far more 
susceptible to being expressed clearly than plagiarism.  Plagiarism is 
often just a matter of poor research habits.

>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.
>
The only problem with cleanup tags is that nobody ever wants to 
cleanup.  When they languish there's a good chance that the contributor 
who could have answered our question is no longer here.  Perhaps we need 
a variation of Mav's wikikarma.  If you add a clean up tag, you should 
clean up a different one in a more familiar subject.

>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.
>
If the question of copyvio can be overcome we should feel free to add 
references that will back up the information, and strenghthen the claim 
that it is not original research.

Ec