daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
I looked at the original site. While some of the material was clearly copied, and it seems obvious that the site mentioned was used as a source, other material there was reworked and we added various wikipedia characteristics, including a taxbox, which did not appear in the original article. I therefore restored the article, and removed the material that was copied directly.
In general, we are getting an increasing number of complaints about copyright violation. While we should always be on guard against this, we should not let this tear down material that was created. Information per se cannot be copyrighted. Our taxoboxes and other, similar features are uniquely Wikipedian. In this case, some of the material was salvagable. It would be a pity to remove that.
While the taxoboxes and the opening paragraphs in those articles were original, virtually the entirety of the text was verbatim copied from the site from which we received the complaint. That's why I marked them with the {{copyvio}} template. I definitely think that the taxoboxes should be copied to a /Temp subpage and the original pages deleted, they look to me like clear-cut copyright violations.
The state of the articles after your edits is perfectly fine, but I thought the whole point of the "rewrite on a /Temp subpage and delete the original" policy was to avoid preserving copyright-violating material in article histories?
Cheers! David...