On 12/4/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
There is now a formal proposal for a criterion for speedy deletion, worded as follows:
- unwikified
- cut-and-pasted verbatim from another website
- less than 48 hours old (could be relaxed if the source is verified
not to be Wikipedia mirror?) 4. no assertion of permission 5. not from a known public domain or GFDL-compatible source
This appears to be an extension of the copyright infringement CSD, which is as follows:
An article that is a blatant copyright infringement and meets these parameters:
- Material is unquestionably copied from the website of a commercial
content provider (e.g. encyclopedia, news service) and;
- The article and its entire history contains only copyright violation
material, excluding tags, templates, and minor edits and;
- Uploader makes no assertion of permission or fair use, and none
seems likely and;
- The material is identified within 48 hours of upload and is almost
or totally un-wikified (to diminish mirror problem).
This ignores the statement of permission that is made during posting of the material, and would not require the deleting administrator to make a proper investigation--unless he knows the article to be from a GFDL source or to be in the public domain, the article can be summarily deleted.
In my opinion this is going far too far. Until recently, copyright infringements had been dealt with perfectly well by listing the material of [[Wikipedia:Copyright problems]]. Under this new proposal, articles that are not even copyright infringements would stand to be deleted on mere suspicion, and without any proper investigation.
As long as 1) the submitter is notified of the deletion (a nicely worded template talking about copyright infringement, apologizing if the deletion was incorrect, etc. could be created for this), and 2) the url is included in the deletion notice, I don't see it as big problem, because it is easy to reverse. If you really think there's a lot of treasure being thrown away, you could go through the deletion log and make a page listing all the articles deleted this way, and then investigate them further.
I think point number five should be clarified and more tightly worded though. Just because the admin doesn't know that the source is public domain isn't really enough. There should probably be at least some evidence that the source *is* copyrighted.
Anthony