On Mon, 18 Jul 2005, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Geoff Burling wrote:
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.
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.
The pagiarism defence is a bit like denying a murder because you were busy robbing a bank on the other side of town at the time of the murder.
Well, the police might accept it, & if the choice is 5-10 years in jail for felony theft or 20+ for murder, I'm sure it's been attempted. But then, this is based on what I've learned from television & I've been told that it does not accurately mirror reality. ;-)
I don't think that citing sources should be limited to controversial subjects. I don't see much modern controversy in an 1868 expedition, but readers should still have the opportunity to find more information.
It depends on your value of "controversial", & if I've learned anything from Wikipedia it's that what one person considers a moot topic is often a heated point of contention for two other people.
I don't expect people to find cites for assertions I consider common knowledge (e.g., Mongola is a nation located in Asia, the dollar is the official currency of the US, Buenos Aires is the capital of Argentina, etc.), but when I find myself in territory where my Bullshit detector is likely to go off -- or where I don't have enough knowledge for my Bullshit detector to work -- I try to cite sources, & expect other people to. And sometimes we both learn that what one assumes is common knowledge is not so common to others -- but that's how Wikipedia works.
In some cases you may want to know whether the information is real or from the contributor's imagination. In Wiktionary this often takes the form of looking for verification that there really is such a word, especially when the word is described as some sort of sexual slang
I think that even fewer people understand the concept of plagiarism than understand the concept of copyright infringment. Notwithstanding the numerous arguments that we have on the subject, infringement is far more susceptible to being expressed clearly than plagiarism. Plagiarism is often just a matter of poor research habits.
The primary problem with plagiarism on Wikipedia is that it inadvertently puts material under the GPL/Creative Commons license that should not belong there. And some authors might consider this stealing -- a situation that reminds me of something from T.S. Eliot that my poetry teacher in college used to quote at us in class: "Bad poets borrow, good poets steal." What Eliot's point was that good poets take an idea from another poet or writer, & change them to such a degree that it takes a detective to uncover the source of the idea.
In short, if you have to steal material for Wikipedia, don't steal like a plagiarist; steal like T.S. Eliot. And if you can't steal it, quote it & provide a source so we know who the words belong to.
Geoff