Plagiarism is use of paraphrased or quoted material without
acknowledgment of the source. We welcome and expect paraphrasing,
which is simply use of information. As you note, we have failed to
make an explicit policy regarding plagiarism, which should be done so
confabulation of plagiarism and copyright violations does not occur.
Fred
On Jul 18, 2005, at 12:42 PM, Geoff Burling wrote:
Maybe this is an example of how I can't find
subjects on Wikipedia,
but I'd rather be proved clueless than right in this case.
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.
So, attempting to be a good little editor, I began to track
down what Wikipedia's policy about plagiarism was (beyond my
assumption that it was bad), & after a good-faith search
(primarily looking at links to [[Plagiarism]] from articles in
the Wikipedia namespace -- which is where policy statements
usually live) discovered only two mentions about plagiarism:
* [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]], where it is discussed in a way to
suggest it is not a copyright violation; &
* [[Wikipedia:Your first article]], where it is mentioned
in a discussion of providing one's sources.
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.
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.
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.
Geoff
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