Maybe this is an example of how I can't find subjects on Wikipedia, but I'd rather be proved clueless than right in this case.
I just stumbled across a copyvio notice on the article [[1868 Expedition to Abyssinia]] which, after examining the evidence with care, I felt was a case of an editor paraphrasing the text of a source far enough to argue that copyright no longer applied; however, the question whether this was plagiarism remained.
So, attempting to be a good little editor, I began to track down what Wikipedia's policy about plagiarism was (beyond my assumption that it was bad), & after a good-faith search (primarily looking at links to [[Plagiarism]] from articles in the Wikipedia namespace -- which is where policy statements usually live) discovered only two mentions about plagiarism:
* [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]], where it is discussed in a way to suggest it is not a copyright violation; & * [[Wikipedia:Your first article]], where it is mentioned in a discussion of providing one's sources.
While this may appear to some as a case of Wikilawyering or [[instruction creep]], I feel it is a serious omission in our list of policies. I hope I'm not alone in saying that I don't want to find any instances of plagiarism in Wikipedia. However, I don't want to find this sort of thing creeping into Wikipedia under the defense "It's not a copyright violation, it's plagiarism", nor do I want unattributed paraphrases of sources being sent to VfD, either speedy or regular, when a simple acknowledgement of sources might solve the problem. And this is a case clearly different than the "Cite sources" policy currently is, which is intended to handle things like adding controversial material without attributing them to a source.
It'd be nice to have some kind of Cleanup tag applied to force the contributor to improve the language &/or supply the source for the text -- but articles have languished on Cleanup for months or years without being fixed.
But I'm willing to live with whatever the consensus is to handle this problem -- even if it is to treat all suspected cases as a copyvio. It's not that I'm asking for an easy solution here (the issue of how much paraphrase is needed in this case clearly pre-empts that), but a sense of what the community consensus is when (& sadly, not "if") I have to fight this problem.
Geoff
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.
Fred
On Jul 18, 2005, at 12:42 PM, Geoff Burling wrote:
Maybe this is an example of how I can't find subjects on Wikipedia, but I'd rather be proved clueless than right in this case.
I just stumbled across a copyvio notice on the article [[1868 Expedition to Abyssinia]] which, after examining the evidence with care, I felt was a case of an editor paraphrasing the text of a source far enough to argue that copyright no longer applied; however, the question whether this was plagiarism remained.
So, attempting to be a good little editor, I began to track down what Wikipedia's policy about plagiarism was (beyond my assumption that it was bad), & after a good-faith search (primarily looking at links to [[Plagiarism]] from articles in the Wikipedia namespace -- which is where policy statements usually live) discovered only two mentions about plagiarism:
- [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]], where it is discussed in a way to
suggest it is not a copyright violation; &
- [[Wikipedia:Your first article]], where it is mentioned
in a discussion of providing one's sources.
While this may appear to some as a case of Wikilawyering or [[instruction creep]], I feel it is a serious omission in our list of policies. I hope I'm not alone in saying that I don't want to find any instances of plagiarism in Wikipedia. However, I don't want to find this sort of thing creeping into Wikipedia under the defense "It's not a copyright violation, it's plagiarism", nor do I want unattributed paraphrases of sources being sent to VfD, either speedy or regular, when a simple acknowledgement of sources might solve the problem. And this is a case clearly different than the "Cite sources" policy currently is, which is intended to handle things like adding controversial material without attributing them to a source.
It'd be nice to have some kind of Cleanup tag applied to force the contributor to improve the language &/or supply the source for the text -- but articles have languished on Cleanup for months or years without being fixed.
But I'm willing to live with whatever the consensus is to handle this problem -- even if it is to treat all suspected cases as a copyvio. It's not that I'm asking for an easy solution here (the issue of how much paraphrase is needed in this case clearly pre-empts that), but a sense of what the community consensus is when (& sadly, not "if") I have to fight this problem.
Geoff
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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.
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
You need to clearly identify the source of your material whether you quote from it or not. If the information comes from it, cite it.
Paraphrasing is strange work. There are many ways to say something, but sometimes the language used in the original is simply the only good way to say something.
Fred
On Jul 18, 2005, at 3:35 PM, Laura Scudder wrote:
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
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Fred Bauder wrote:
You need to clearly identify the source of your material whether you quote from it or not. If the information comes from it, cite it.
Paraphrasing is strange work. There are many ways to say something, but sometimes the language used in the original is simply the only good way to say something.
In some cases of dictionary definitions it may not just be the only good way, but the only way. Such things may not be copyrightable. For scientific terms in particular precision is required. If you vary too much from the source to avoid copyvios the science that results may be completely different.
Ec
Plagiarism is simply the use of a source without attribution; passing others' work and ideas off as one's own. But on Wikipedia, we should not be passing off ANYTHING as our own (No original research). Thus it can be seen the Wikipedia goal is different than that of an academic paper or suchlike. In academia, the crime is one of claiming credit to oneself that deserves to go to another. On Wikipedia, we're not writing for individual credit.
Thus, it is unsurprising that Wikipedia has no explicit plagiarism policies; it is subsumed under WP:NOR and WP:CITE. Although, as Fred Bauder says, we probably should have a page on it in policy anyway, so as not to confuse people coming from outside.
In general, if a Wikipedia article (or a section of it) is a paraphrase of another work, that may mean that insufficient sources were used in its writing. That can be corrected.
-Matt (User:Morven)
Geoff Burling wrote:
I just stumbled across a copyvio notice on the article [[1868 Expedition to Abyssinia]] which, after examining the evidence with care, I felt was a case of an editor paraphrasing the text of a source far enough to argue that copyright no longer applied; however, the question whether this was plagiarism remained.
While this may appear to some as a case of Wikilawyering or [[instruction creep]], I feel it is a serious omission in our list of policies. I hope I'm not alone in saying that I don't want to find any instances of plagiarism in Wikipedia. However, I don't want to find this sort of thing creeping into Wikipedia under the defense "It's not a copyright violation, it's plagiarism", nor do I want unattributed paraphrases of sources being sent to VfD, either speedy or regular, when a simple acknowledgement of sources might solve the problem. And this is a case clearly different than the "Cite sources" policy currently is, which is intended to handle things like adding controversial material without attributing them to a source.
The pagiarism defence is a bit like denying a murder because you were busy robbing a bank on the other side of town at the time of the murder. I don't think that citing sources should be limited to controversial subjects. I don't see much modern controversy in an 1868 expedition, but readers should still have the opportunity to find more information. In some cases you may want to know whether the information is real or from the contributor's imagination. In Wiktionary this often takes the form of looking for verification that there really is such a word, especially when the word is described as some sort of sexual slang
I think that even fewer people understand the concept of plagiarism than understand the concept of copyright infringment. Notwithstanding the numerous arguments that we have on the subject, infringement is far more susceptible to being expressed clearly than plagiarism. Plagiarism is often just a matter of poor research habits.
It'd be nice to have some kind of Cleanup tag applied to force the contributor to improve the language &/or supply the source for the text -- but articles have languished on Cleanup for months or years without being fixed.
The only problem with cleanup tags is that nobody ever wants to cleanup. When they languish there's a good chance that the contributor who could have answered our question is no longer here. Perhaps we need a variation of Mav's wikikarma. If you add a clean up tag, you should clean up a different one in a more familiar subject.
But I'm willing to live with whatever the consensus is to handle this problem -- even if it is to treat all suspected cases as a copyvio. It's not that I'm asking for an easy solution here (the issue of how much paraphrase is needed in this case clearly pre-empts that), but a sense of what the community consensus is when (& sadly, not "if") I have to fight this problem.
If the question of copyvio can be overcome we should feel free to add references that will back up the information, and strenghthen the claim that it is not original research.
Ec
On Mon, 18 Jul 2005, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Geoff Burling wrote:
I just stumbled across a copyvio notice on the article [[1868 Expedition to Abyssinia]] which, after examining the evidence with care, I felt was a case of an editor paraphrasing the text of a source far enough to argue that copyright no longer applied; however, the question whether this was plagiarism remained.
While this may appear to some as a case of Wikilawyering or [[instruction creep]], I feel it is a serious omission in our list of policies. I hope I'm not alone in saying that I don't want to find any instances of plagiarism in Wikipedia. However, I don't want to find this sort of thing creeping into Wikipedia under the defense "It's not a copyright violation, it's plagiarism", nor do I want unattributed paraphrases of sources being sent to VfD, either speedy or regular, when a simple acknowledgement of sources might solve the problem. And this is a case clearly different than the "Cite sources" policy currently is, which is intended to handle things like adding controversial material without attributing them to a source.
The pagiarism defence is a bit like denying a murder because you were busy robbing a bank on the other side of town at the time of the murder.
Well, the police might accept it, & if the choice is 5-10 years in jail for felony theft or 20+ for murder, I'm sure it's been attempted. But then, this is based on what I've learned from television & I've been told that it does not accurately mirror reality. ;-)
I don't think that citing sources should be limited to controversial subjects. I don't see much modern controversy in an 1868 expedition, but readers should still have the opportunity to find more information.
It depends on your value of "controversial", & if I've learned anything from Wikipedia it's that what one person considers a moot topic is often a heated point of contention for two other people.
I don't expect people to find cites for assertions I consider common knowledge (e.g., Mongola is a nation located in Asia, the dollar is the official currency of the US, Buenos Aires is the capital of Argentina, etc.), but when I find myself in territory where my Bullshit detector is likely to go off -- or where I don't have enough knowledge for my Bullshit detector to work -- I try to cite sources, & expect other people to. And sometimes we both learn that what one assumes is common knowledge is not so common to others -- but that's how Wikipedia works.
In some cases you may want to know whether the information is real or from the contributor's imagination. In Wiktionary this often takes the form of looking for verification that there really is such a word, especially when the word is described as some sort of sexual slang
I think that even fewer people understand the concept of plagiarism than understand the concept of copyright infringment. Notwithstanding the numerous arguments that we have on the subject, infringement is far more susceptible to being expressed clearly than plagiarism. Plagiarism is often just a matter of poor research habits.
The primary problem with plagiarism on Wikipedia is that it inadvertently puts material under the GPL/Creative Commons license that should not belong there. And some authors might consider this stealing -- a situation that reminds me of something from T.S. Eliot that my poetry teacher in college used to quote at us in class: "Bad poets borrow, good poets steal." What Eliot's point was that good poets take an idea from another poet or writer, & change them to such a degree that it takes a detective to uncover the source of the idea.
In short, if you have to steal material for Wikipedia, don't steal like a plagiarist; steal like T.S. Eliot. And if you can't steal it, quote it & provide a source so we know who the words belong to.
Geoff
On 7/20/05, Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
In short, if you have to steal material for Wikipedia, don't steal like a plagiarist; steal like T.S. Eliot. And if you can't steal it, quote it & provide a source so we know who the words belong to.
As a poet (example below) I can appreciate this stealing of material. Robert Heinlein used to say much the same thing except he always added something about filing off the serial numbers.
My problem with this is that if we steal something and alter it enough to be unrecognisable, then how does this square with "No Original Research".
Now that poem. I stole this from an anecdote by a columnist in an Australian newspaper about being in a lift with Lionel Murphy.
Your task: to write the funniest poem you can, in any style, on the subject of mistaken identity.
Sunday Morning Coming Down and Letting Go =========================================
After service this morning we lingered, we three, The reverend Golightly, my dear wife and me. The sun streamed in as we talked at the door; The stained glass tinting the old wooden floor. I relaxed for a moment, and then with a sigh My breakfast beans blew quietly by.
I thought I'd escaped, and I would have had if It hadn't been *quite* so much of a whiff. My wife stopped her chatter, sniffed and said "Pooh!" Then gazed at me sternly. "Was that awful smell you?" She gave me a Look and my heart gave a lurch, What, admit before God that I'd farted in church?
"Me, dear? Of course not!" I said without thinking. Holding my ground as they both stood there blinking. A moment of hush and the reverend mused "Oh it must have been me, then. Please do excuse!"
Pete, all his own work
Geoff Burling (llywrch@agora.rdrop.com) [050719 04:49]:
It'd be nice to have some kind of Cleanup tag applied to force the contributor to improve the language &/or supply the source for the text -- but articles have languished on Cleanup for months or years without being fixed.
{{unreferenced}} ?
- d.
On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, David Gerard wrote:
Geoff Burling (llywrch@agora.rdrop.com) [050719 04:49]:
It'd be nice to have some kind of Cleanup tag applied to force the contributor to improve the language &/or supply the source for the text -- but articles have languished on Cleanup for months or years without being fixed.
{{unreferenced}} ?
As tempting as this is, it doesn't address the problem of plagiarism squarely.
Plagiarism will only become an issue when someone notices that the text of an article is close enough to the text of an online site to raise the question of a copyvio; in this case, the person who would add the tag *knows* the source. And if the language has been altered enough so that this editor is confident that the article is not a copyvio, then wouldn't it be far simpler just to add a Reference section with the URL than one more tag people might ignore?
So does that mean that in the case of plagiarism, our options are either to delete the article as a copyvio, or provide a link to the source? Somehow a simple reference isn't enough in my eyes, & I suspect that few authors of online material would appreciate a statement along the lines of "This article uses text taken from {{insert URL}}." In this era of copyright abuse[*], it's a practically a confession that we stole material.
Geoff
[*] By "abuse", I mean that individuals like the Disney Corporation are abusing the situation, although I understand they insist it's the other way round.