On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, David Gerard wrote:
Geoff Burling (llywrch@agora.rdrop.com) [050719 04:49]:
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.
{{unreferenced}} ?
As tempting as this is, it doesn't address the problem of plagiarism squarely.
Plagiarism will only become an issue when someone notices that the text of an article is close enough to the text of an online site to raise the question of a copyvio; in this case, the person who would add the tag *knows* the source. And if the language has been altered enough so that this editor is confident that the article is not a copyvio, then wouldn't it be far simpler just to add a Reference section with the URL than one more tag people might ignore?
So does that mean that in the case of plagiarism, our options are either to delete the article as a copyvio, or provide a link to the source? Somehow a simple reference isn't enough in my eyes, & I suspect that few authors of online material would appreciate a statement along the lines of "This article uses text taken from {{insert URL}}." In this era of copyright abuse[*], it's a practically a confession that we stole material.
Geoff
[*] By "abuse", I mean that individuals like the Disney Corporation are abusing the situation, although I understand they insist it's the other way round.