[WikiEN-l] Plagiarism Policy, was A Missing Policy

[Fred Bauder]

Plagiarism is use of paraphrased or quoted material without  
acknowledgment of the source. We welcome and expect paraphrasing,  
which is simply use of information. As you note, we have failed to  
make an explicit policy regarding plagiarism, which should be done so  
confabulation of plagiarism and copyright violations does not occur.

Fred

On Jul 18, 2005, at 12:42 PM, Geoff Burling wrote:

> Maybe this is an example of how I can't find subjects on Wikipedia,
> but I'd rather be proved clueless than right in this case.
>
> 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.
>
> So, attempting to be a good little editor, I began to track
> down what Wikipedia's policy about plagiarism was (beyond my
> assumption that it was bad), & after a good-faith search
> (primarily looking at links to [[Plagiarism]] from articles in
> the Wikipedia namespace -- which is where policy statements
> usually live) discovered only two mentions about plagiarism:
>
> * [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]], where it is discussed in a way to
> suggest it is not a copyright violation; &
> * [[Wikipedia:Your first article]], where it is mentioned
> in a discussion of providing one's sources.
>
> 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.
>
> It'd be nice to have some kind of Cleanup tag applied to force
> the contributor to improve the language &/or supply the source
> for the text -- but articles have languished on Cleanup for
> months or years without being fixed.
>
> But I'm willing to live with whatever the consensus is to
> handle this problem -- even if it is to treat all suspected cases
> as a copyvio. It's not that I'm asking for an easy solution here
> (the issue of how much paraphrase is needed in this case clearly
> pre-empts that), but a sense of what the community consensus is
> when (& sadly, not "if") I have to fight this problem.
>
> Geoff
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>