(Sorry for not responding to this thread sooner. I've been very busy in the last few days, including losing my glasses & having to get them repalced.)
On Thu, 21 Jul 2005, Matt Brown wrote:
On 7/20/05, Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
As I pointed out in another email, adding plagiarised content to Wikipedia can be understood as taking written material someone owns & releases it under the GFDL or Creative Commons without first consulting the author or owner.
I think you are confusing copyright infringement with plagiarism. We already have policies against copyright infringement, and enforce them fairly strictly. I think the rest of us were talking about the kind of plagiarism that did not involve copyright infringement.
I don't think there is any doubt about having zero tolerance for copyright infringement.
Well, since at least one person thinks I am not clear about what I'm talking about, let's take a look at the article that prompted to ask for a disinterested opinion about plagiarism, [[1868 expedition to Ethiopia]]. Please take a look at the history of this article, & the source from which it is taken before reading further.
(Note: my concern for this article, & the whole question of plagiarism arose from trying to find a way to salvage something from this article: there are a lot of holes in our coverage of Ethiopia, & this submission helps to covers an important event of Ethiopian history. If it is deleted, I could replace it with content for which there is no question of copyright -- but that would take a long time for me to create, since I have a couple dozen other articles in the pipeline. So I would like to save myself some work -- & encourage a Wikipedian to keep contirbuting.)
Now, having examined the two documents, I hope we will all agree that the Wikipedia article has been derived from the other article, *but* acknowledge that some changes in the text have occured: the addition of a header paragraph, section headers, & some rephrasing. This article has wording unique to Wikipedia, yet it uses words or phrases from the parent document. Thus I feel that we are confronted with one of 3 cases:
* Conclude that, despite the changes made to the original test that this is a copyright violation because the original source can be recognized & delete it. However, if we do this, then we encounter the problem -- as Fred Bauer expressed it -- of ignoring whether the Wikipedian is guilty of nothing more than clumsiness in his rephrasing of the original.
* Conclude that the changes, as few as they are, meets the statutory requirement of creating new content, & keep the article. However, if we do that, then we are infringing in a visible way on the rights of the original author. I'm not entirely sure that simply adding an acknowledgement that we re-used the original author's words to the Wikipedia article will make everything honkey-dorey now.
* The third conclusion: this is plagiarism, not copyright infringement, not some original rephrasing or rewriting of a topic someone else has written about. By doing so, we acknowledge that the text exists in a state between our first two choices, which might not have become an issue if the Wikipedian had included in a reasonable time proper credit to her/his source.
Note: my use of the plagiarism to denote unattributed reuse of wording from another author falls within the understood use of that word. I would like to point to http://www.indiana.edu/~istd/definition.html, where the definition of plagiarism includes reuse of "ideas, words, or statements of another person without appropriate acknowledgment". Please carefully note the phrases "words or statements"; if someone can trace the source of a Wikipedia article thru a simple Google search, & there is no acknowledgement of the source, it is plagiarism, regardless how extensively the orginal article is rewritten.
And this problem will recur whenever a Wikipedian adapts material taken from another source, no matter where or how we draw the line between "original content" & "copyright violation". I feel it is better to acknowledge that there is a fuzzy boundary here, that the fuzziness should be acknowledged -- but a decision must be made whether to accept the problematic case into Wikipedia -- or delete it.
And yes, hard cases make bad law, but these are the cases that in the end get sent up to someone with more authority to make a decision on. I'd rather let a consensus of a large, informed & thoughtful group do it, than a small few who don't reflect the opinions of the Wikipedia community.
And if you are sick of listening to my tendentious whinging on this matter, then go to the appropriate page & register that you either agree or disagree with my opinion. Including the person who listed this article as a copyvio, only 3 people have expressed an opinion about the copyright status of this article: one person wants to remove the article, another wants to keep it, & my comment wondering about its status. If people add to the discussion, then I'll learn -- if nothing else -- that I'm mistaken about this whole issue.
Geoff