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