[WikiEN-l] New proposal for summary eletion of non-copyright infringing material, on suspicion

Sun Dec 4 14:38:17 UTC 2005

On 12/4/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> There is now a formal proposal for a criterion for speedy deletion,
> worded as follows:
>
> 1. unwikified
> 2. cut-and-pasted verbatim from another website
> 3. less than 48 hours old (could be relaxed if the source is verified
> not to be Wikipedia mirror?)
> 4. no assertion of permission
> 5. not from a known public domain or GFDL-compatible source
>
> This appears to be an extension of the copyright infringement CSD,
> which is as follows:
>
> An article that is a blatant copyright infringement and meets these parameters:
>
> * Material is unquestionably copied from the website of a commercial
> content provider (e.g. encyclopedia, news service) and;
> * The article and its entire history contains only copyright violation
> material, excluding tags, templates, and minor edits and;
> * Uploader makes no assertion of permission or fair use, and none
> seems likely and;
> * The material is identified within 48 hours of upload and is almost
> or totally un-wikified (to diminish mirror problem).
>
> This ignores the statement of permission that is made during posting
> of the material, and would not require the deleting administrator to
> make a proper investigation--unless he knows the article to be from a
> GFDL source or to be in the public domain, the article can be
> summarily deleted.
>
> In my opinion this is going far too far.  Until recently, copyright
> infringements had been dealt with perfectly well by listing the
> material of [[Wikipedia:Copyright problems]].  Under this new
> proposal, articles that are not even copyright infringements would
> stand to be deleted on mere suspicion, and without any proper
> investigation.

As long as 1) the submitter is notified of the deletion (a nicely
worded template talking about copyright infringement, apologizing if
the deletion was incorrect, etc. could be created for this), and 2)
the url is included in the deletion notice, I don't see it as big
problem, because it is easy to reverse.  If you really think there's a
lot of treasure being thrown away, you could go through the deletion
log and make a page listing all the articles deleted this way, and
then investigate them further.

I think point number five should be clarified and more tightly worded
though.  Just because the admin doesn't know that the source is public
domain isn't really enough.  There should probably be at least some
evidence that the source *is* copyrighted.

Anthony