Members and Mr. Crocker,
I was responding directly to the post by Mr.
Pobratyn. He said:
I have a bit of a moral dilemma here: some articles on
wikipedia seem to pop-up non-wikified and written
slightly 'too well'. It seems obvious that
it is a copy/paste job from another source. What should
we/I do in such a case? Delete it?
I take plagiarism extremely seriously and many
members of Nupedia, at least, know that. For the same
reason, I take an unsupported claim of plagiarism
extremely seriously and consider it a dangerous move.
Mr. Pobratyn cited as the basis for his suspicions,
articles that appear, I guess, full-blown, unwikified,
and written "too well."
I reacted to this, because I have posted articles
that way, although I usually wikify them, somewhat. As I
said, this is because they are literally copied from my
own work.
On a more general level, these symptoms in an
article or entry are not a basis to delete them. This
requires proof that the entry has been "borrowed" from
a copyrighted source.
If you gentlemen have some particular author/s in
mind, I suggest you put your heads together and try to
find the source. But to delete them out of hand,
implying they are plagiarised, to me. is assuming guilt
until one proves oneself innocent. I think a better
approach, and the one that supposedly prevails in the
U.S.A., is to assume someone is innocent until proven
guilty.
As far as my insulting the original poster, I say
them let him speak for himself. I really prefer not to
get involved in what you, Mr. Crocker, think that the
original poster feels. Only he can say whether he found
my post insulting. C'est ca.
As Ever,
Ruth Ifcher
--
> The fact that you would consider an honest and concerned post
> personally insulting to you is absurd, and is itself insulting to the
> original poster who was obviously sincere and interested in solving a
> real problem, and didn't mention any names (in fact, I'm almost
> certain I know who he _was_ referring to, and it wasn't you--and I'm
> not going to say more than that).
>
> The problem itself (of discovering and removing copyrighted material)
> is real, serious, and needs to be dealt with. Sure, you and I may
> copy and paste only from our own or public domain material because we
> understand the law, but many people on Wikipedia HAVE copied
> copyrighted material, and that's a problem.
>
> There is no such thing as an "administrator" in Wikipedia in the
> sense of someone responsible for its content, nor should there be.
> Nupedia has those (and should); Wikipedia just has us, and we are
> just as responsible for its content as anyone else. It does have a
> few folks to set policy, but even they have been very respectful of
> the community process of content creation and not tried to subvert it
> by establishing "control" or "ownership". Further, it is obviously
> impractical to have an infintely scalable content-creation method
> with non-scalable editing and expect to keep up. Wikipedia CANNOT
> work unless EVERYONE is an editor and administrator as well as an
> author.
>
> The suggestion of looking for phrases on the web is useful; it does
> often turn up the copyrighted source of a cut-and-paste job. I would
> further suggest that when you find the source of the material,
> document it; i.e., make a talk page or editing comment along the
> lines of "Delete copyrighted material from ...", so that everyone
> else benefits from your research and knows why it was deleted.
>
> But if you can't find the source, I think you do have to give an
> author the benefit of the doubt--especially logged-in authors. If
> the work _is_ copyrighted, removal upon notification by the copyright
> holder is sufficient to avoid legal penalties.
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