Inviting an author to participate is good idea in many cases, but we are still missing an important policy area.
I have been working on Texas congressional bios lately, which involves much summarizing of the Congressional Bioguide and the Handbook of Texas Online, and have often felt myself a little unsure of exactly how much paraphrasing and referencing I need to do when some of the bios mostly consist of a list of facts. A clear policy page would be very helpful in these sorts of cases.
Laura Scudder
On 7/18/05, Skyring skyring@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/19/05, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
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.
Sometimes sources of information are limited, or the information itself is limited and there are only so many ways to paraphrase it. But plagiarism is easy in this age of cut and paste and we need to guard against it as WP becomes ever more widely accepted, because the authors of original material will doubtless turn to WP to see what we have to say on their specialist topic, and if they see their own words quoted without attribution, then they are: A) not going to be happy and B) dismissive of WP as a whole.
WP isn't a mainstream encyclopaedia and we editors aren't a select club (except by self-selection), so may I suggest that instead of cutting and pasting at worst or paraphrasing at best, we make it policy to ask third-party authors if they would like to contribute to an article?
My feeling is that if they have gone to the trouble of researching a subject and writing something that we feel is good enough for inclusion, then they would be honoured by a request to contribute directly, and they would make a better contribution on a specialist topic than anything we "generalists" could do by paraphrasing.
-- Peter in Canberra _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l