I looked at the original site. While some of the material was clearly copied, and it seems obvious that the site mentioned was used as a source, other material there was reworked and we added various wikipedia characteristics, including a taxbox, which did not appear in the original article. I therefore restored the article, and removed the material that was copied directly.
In general, we are getting an increasing number of complaints about copyright violation. While we should always be on guard against this, we should not let this tear down material that was created. Information per se cannot be copyrighted. Our taxoboxes and other, similar features are uniquely Wikipedian. In this case, some of the material was salvagable. It would be a pity to remove that.
Danny
daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
I looked at the original site. While some of the material was clearly copied, and it seems obvious that the site mentioned was used as a source, other material there was reworked and we added various wikipedia characteristics, including a taxbox, which did not appear in the original article. I therefore restored the article, and removed the material that was copied directly.
In general, we are getting an increasing number of complaints about copyright violation. While we should always be on guard against this, we should not let this tear down material that was created. Information per se cannot be copyrighted. Our taxoboxes and other, similar features are uniquely Wikipedian. In this case, some of the material was salvagable. It would be a pity to remove that.
I agree that it's important to avoid overreacting when there is a copyright complaint. I can see where our author should not be faulted too much. The wording of the copyright notice alone would not prevent us from copying without asking permission. We are not using it for commercial purposes. The problem is that we cannot guarantee that a downstream user will be aware of this.
All information on this web site is copyrighted and cannot be used for any commercial purposes without prior permission. Educational, research, and not-for-profit use is allowed, if you cite the source (as Gentian Research Network, or when applicable, individual copyright holders). Look at the bottom of each page for copyright information.
Adenolisianthus was first described in1895. The official description is in the public domain, but I don't know how much the description varies from the official one. Even with a more modern taxom I would wonder about the copyrightability of such a description.
Ec
daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
I looked at the original site. While some of the material was clearly copied, and it seems obvious that the site mentioned was used as a source, other material there was reworked and we added various wikipedia characteristics, including a taxbox, which did not appear in the original article. I therefore restored the article, and removed the material that was copied directly.
In general, we are getting an increasing number of complaints about copyright violation. While we should always be on guard against this, we should not let this tear down material that was created. Information per se cannot be copyrighted. Our taxoboxes and other, similar features are uniquely Wikipedian. In this case, some of the material was salvagable. It would be a pity to remove that.
While the taxoboxes and the opening paragraphs in those articles were original, virtually the entirety of the text was verbatim copied from the site from which we received the complaint. That's why I marked them with the {{copyvio}} template. I definitely think that the taxoboxes should be copied to a /Temp subpage and the original pages deleted, they look to me like clear-cut copyright violations.
The state of the articles after your edits is perfectly fine, but I thought the whole point of the "rewrite on a /Temp subpage and delete the original" policy was to avoid preserving copyright-violating material in article histories?
Cheers! David...
David Carson wrote:
The state of the articles after your edits is perfectly fine, but I thought the whole point of the "rewrite on a /Temp subpage and delete the original" policy was to avoid preserving copyright-violating material in article histories?
Cases like this are a tricky issue. It's okay if the original author rewrites on a /Temp subpage and the original is deleted. However, copying material to a /Temp subpage and deleting the original is problematic, because now you've lost the attribution history: it looks like whoever created the /Temp subpage wrote that text, when it was actually someone else, which is at least technically a violation of the GFDL. The tension, of course, is that we'd want to both preserve history *and* delete copyvios from the history in such cases, which only developers can do (by deleting specific revisions from the history).
-Mark