[Wikipedia-l] Re: Copyright violations at download.wikimedia.org

[Roger Luethi]

On Sat, 04 Jun 2005 17:15:37 +0200, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > I find plenty of copyvios that are several days old, and I've had to
> > undo the work of weeks or months because some people just copy and
> > paste stuff from other web sites (no, not WP mirrors) without being
> > caught. That is a very unpleasant experience for everyone involved,
> > especially if other editors kept working on the text in good faith.
> 
> I wonder what we can do to improve the situation.

I agree with David Gerard's suggestion, but here I will focus on how
to prevent copyvios or catch them early:

* Make the copyvio warning on the edit page more visible. I notice that
  the German WP comes with a warning in a fat box with a red border. It
  is so cheap I am positive it will pay for its cost.
  Scroll to the bottom of this page to see how it looks like:
  http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Saint-Cloud&action=edit

* Clarify policy: WP:CP works quite well for pages that started as
  copyvio, at least if they are caught early. The page also gives
  instructions for dealing with pages "where the most recent edit is a
  copyright violation, but the previous article was not".
  However, what if a copyvio added material several months ago, and
  many editors kept working on the article afterwards? I say the article
  remains a derived work and must be reverted to the last clean state,
  but others disagree.
  Either way, there are too many conflicting opinions scattered all
  over WP and meta.

* Be strict: I contend that a key reason for the epidemic is that many,
  even experienced editors are both too lenient and too careless. Large
  contributions of perfect prose from unknown editors do not trigger
  suspicion and checks nearly as often as they should. And unlike
  vandalism or personal attacks, copyvios are often met with a cavalier
  attitude which sends the wrong message.

Having a clear policy and being strict about it would make at least
the regulars more vigilant which in turn should help prevent unpleasant
surprises further down the road. It would also make the task of hunting
down copyvios cheaper, because arguing with unabashed copyvio apologists
is a significant cost today.

I can imagine software tools more advanced then the current method of
manually feeding some snippets from suspicious contributions to Google,
but why bother if we don't pick the low hanging fruit as outlined
above first?

Roger