On 5/31/05, Roger Luethi collector@hellgate.ch wrote:
Based on my experience in patrolling WP.en I think you are a tad over-optimistic. What you see on WP:CP may only be the tip of the iceberg.
I would agree.
I find plenty of copyvios that are several days old, and I've had to undo the work of weeks or months because some people just copy and paste stuff from other web sites (no, not WP mirrors) without being caught. That is a very unpleasant experience for everyone involved, especially if other editors kept working on the text in good faith.
The longer a copyvio remains unchallenged, the harder it becomes to catch it after several copyedits changed bits and pieces of it. That doesn't fix the copyvio, though. I had a case just yesterday where my reverting a copyvio was reverted again, and editors started "refactoring" the text to "mitigate" the problem.
My favorite en.wikipedia copyvio story: Marked an image as copyvio on the wp:cp page, two weeks later nothing was done, so I replaced the image with a cruddy sketch just to get it out of the current version... A few days later another wikipedian replaced my cruddy sketch with another drawing (the first hit for the subject on GIS at the time) and tagged as PD, saying in the summery that it came from a state university webpage and was thus PD (!!?!). The image actually came off some students home page, I contacted the student.. and the image was not PD nor was the student the copyright holder. :) ... So far, every single copyright tag I've checked out on en has been incorrect, although I've only checked out the suspicious ones, so it's not a fair assessment.
With text it's even worse because our public editing process make it much easier for someone to prove that our text was a derived work, where in a more traditional medium a sufficient amount of refactoring would usually manage to hide the violation.
With images I plan on just replacing all the ones with suspect copyright (i.e. everything that isn't CC* or GFDL and uploaded by the author, or with an actual letter attached that explicitly says PD or an acceptable license) over time... but I have no idea how to solve text.