On Thu, 21 Jul 2005, Skyring wrote:
On 7/20/05, Ben bratsche1@gmail.com wrote:
This is just the way to prevent some more instruction creep: reinforce and enforce existing policies.
Yup. NOR and CITE cover the plagiarism issue.
Well, I beg to differ. 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.
Now plagiarism is a very specific situation that is related to CITE, but I do not feel is identical to it. CITE refers to the facts or assertions in an article; plagiarism refers to the language. And if one editor reuses text in a Wikipedia article that is similar enough to its unattributed source that a Google search can reasonably identify it, then the question of a copyright infringement ensues.
And although the usual defence against a copyright infringement is to invoke "fair use", because no one recognizes plagiarism as fair use it therefore should be treated as a copyright violation -- unless the editor responsible properly adds cites/references either at the time of the edit -- or in a reasonably short period afterwards.
In short, plagiarism should be treated as a copyright violation, & should be explicitly covered in our policies under copyright. Does this seem reasonable to everyone?
***NOTE***: I will interpret silence as consent, & if no one objects, submit this as a proposed Wikipedia Policy.
Geoff