hi james, this sounds interesting. the only obstacle i see is that neither the service nor the software nor the database are open. by using turnitin we would give up on the principle of opening contents, at least in this area. this might be perceived bad for opening content, editor retention, and gaining new editors.
from a turnitin standpoint this might be marketing until they are well known. as soon their goals are reached there is danger this will be discontinued or the terms changed to be not acceptable any more.
technical and license obstacles do exist. to properly check wikipedia editors would need access to restricted content. either content is copied somewhere in the open, permission granted for all, or in the worst case, a restricted number of editors.
not to forget is potential link spam. turnitin would put links to a site not in control of the movement all over the place. they could without problems put other content behind the links at any time.
but, i do think one could find a less risky and more open way to do check for plagiarism. one might find better ways to access wikipedia dumps, better access to recent changes, permission to automatically report back issues, nitification of contributors and admins. all in a kind of standardized way (i.e. well defined interface), and most important, usable by everybody, for free.
rupert Am 21.07.2014 04:05 schrieb "Leigh Thelmadatter" osamadre@hotmail.com:
This is one of the best ideas Ive read on here!
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 20:00:28 -0600 From: jmh649@gmail.com To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org; eloquence@gmail.com;
fschulenburg@wikimedia.org; ladsgroup@gmail.com; jorlowitz@gmail.com; madman.enwiki@gmail.com; west.andrew.g@gmail.com
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Catching copy and pasting early
Come across another few thousand edits of copy and paste violations again today. These have occurred over more than a year. It is wearing me out. Really what is the point on collaborating on Wikipedia if it is simply a copyright violation. We need a solution and one has been proposed here a couple of years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Turnitin
We now need programmers to carry it out. The Wiki Education Foundation
has
expressed interest. We will need support from the foundation as this software will likely need to mesh closely with edits as they come in. I
am
willing to offer $5,000 dollars Canadian (almost the same as American)
for
a working solution that tags potential copyright issues in near real time with a greater than 90% accuracy. It is to function on at least all
medical
and pharmacology articles but I would not complain if it worked on all of Wikipedia. The WMF is free to apply.
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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