[Wikipedia-l] Copyvio bot (was: Yahoo has choosen Wikipedia for his non-commercial channel of CAP)

Thu Mar 4 20:23:18 UTC 2004

Robert Michel wrote:
>PS: Search engines like Yahoo could be a good partner to 
>get support to use  their server more than 1000 times a 
>day, for example with a script which  check every new 
>entry if it was only a copy&paste from one webpage or  
>newsposting. Do you think when the Wikipedia Foundation 
>would request for  support, this would be realistic? E.G. 
>Yahoo should has been an interest of  their own that we 
>don`t use copy right protectet material ;) 

Sorry for the 'me too', but... 

I think this is a great idea. :) 

As the volume of edits increase, being able to check new contributions for
copyright violations becomes more important since even if a very small
percentage of edits have copyvios, that still will be an absolutely large
amount of text given enough time. 

Such a thing could poison and potentially doom any chance for a print version
of any of our content. Fixing a copyvio on the wiki after being notified is
easy. Fixing a copyvio printed on 50,000 print copies would be impossible. 

A bot checking each new article and each new major diff for copyvios would be
very helpful. It could be written so that anything from websites known to host
public domain or free content could be excluded from being added to a suspected
copyvio list. Humans would still have to go through that list and make
decisions on whether or not the suspected copyvios are in fact copyvios.
Feeback from that could be used to further refine the copyvio bot. 

But yes, that would require more than 1000 searches a day from a single IP
address. We could get around that by coordinating copyvio bot use by several
users from each wiki, but IMO a better way to do it would be to have the bot
become part of MediaWiki and for the service to be run by the Wikimedia
servers. That will require special permission to exceed the 1000 search a day
limit. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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