[WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 2:08 PM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> The Cunctator wrote:
>> Sometimes I don't understand people. Carcharoth goes to the trouble of
>> finding his birth date, learning he received the Brazilian Order of Merit,
>> and lists out some copy errors, but then doesn't fix the page?
>>
>> I mean, what's the point?
>>
> Um, maybe email is OK in the working environment, but spending time
> editing WP not so? Just a thought. You seem a little impatient with
> someone who is not in your time zone.

Thanks, Charles.

I did add the stuff I found, but clearly more is possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Robert_Corell&action=historysubmit&diff=340496552&oldid=340442133

One problem with people rushing around adding sources to BLPs that may
be deleted is that other stuff gets missed.

Compare this:

http://sustsci.aaas.org/content.html?contentid=471

With the initial version of the article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Robert_Corell&oldid=76775195

Our article started on 20 September 2006.

The aaas sustsci forum doesn't give a date for their article (which is
unhelpful).

So it is not clear which came first, but portions of each are identical.

"Prior to joining the NSF in 1987, he was a Professor and academic
administrator at"; "Dr. Corell is an oceanographer and engineer by
background and training, having received". The facts are not
copyrighted, and it is sometimes difficult to avoid standard
biographical phrasings, but the wording is too close there. I haven't
changed it yet, because I'm not sure which text came first.

Taking an unreferenced block of text and working out if any portions
of it are straight copy-paste copyvios is a nightmare to do. Many
people don't bother, or just stick in a reference. The point here is
that the sequence:

i) Unreferenced text by anonymous or drive-by contributor
ii) Wikified and tidied up by Wikpedians and left unreferenced for several years
iii) References hurriedly added to save from deletion

Will lead to a lot of situations like this.

Carcharoth