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

[Geoff Burling]

(Sorry for not responding to this thread sooner. I've been very busy
in the last few days, including losing my glasses & having to get them
repalced.)

On Thu, 21 Jul 2005, Matt Brown wrote:

> On 7/20/05, Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
> > As I pointed out in another email, adding plagiarised content to Wikipedia
> > can be understood as taking written material someone owns & releases it
> > under the GFDL or Creative Commons without first consulting the author
> > or owner.
>
> I think you are confusing copyright infringement with plagiarism.  We
> already have policies against copyright infringement, and enforce them
> fairly strictly.  I think the rest of us were talking about the kind
> of plagiarism that did not involve copyright infringement.
>
> I don't think there is any doubt about having zero tolerance for
> copyright infringement.
>
Well, since at least one person thinks I am not clear about what I'm
talking about, let's take a look at the article that prompted to ask
for a disinterested opinion about plagiarism, [[1868 expedition to Ethiopia]].
Please take a look at the history of this article, & the source from which
it is taken before reading further.

(Note: my concern for this article, & the whole question of plagiarism
arose from trying to find a way to salvage something from this article:
there are a lot of holes in our coverage of Ethiopia, & this submission
helps to covers an important event of Ethiopian history. If it is deleted,
I could replace it with content for which there is no question of
copyright -- but that would take a long time for me to create, since I
have a couple dozen other articles in the pipeline. So I would like
to save myself some work -- & encourage a Wikipedian to keep contirbuting.)

Now, having examined the two documents, I hope we will all agree that
the Wikipedia article has been derived from the other article, *but*
acknowledge that some changes in the text have occured: the addition of
a header paragraph, section headers, & some rephrasing. This article
has wording unique to Wikipedia, yet it uses words or phrases from the
parent document. Thus I feel that we are confronted with one of 3 cases:

* Conclude that, despite the changes made to the original test that this
is a copyright violation because the original source can be recognized
& delete it. However, if we do this, then we encounter the problem -- as
Fred Bauer expressed it -- of ignoring whether the Wikipedian is guilty
of nothing more than clumsiness in his rephrasing of the original.

* Conclude that the changes, as few as they are, meets the statutory
requirement of creating new content, & keep the article. However, if we
do that, then we are infringing in a visible way on the rights of the
original author. I'm not entirely sure that simply adding an acknowledgement
that we re-used the original author's words to the Wikipedia article
will make everything honkey-dorey now.

* The third conclusion: this is plagiarism, not copyright infringement,
not some original rephrasing or rewriting of a topic someone else has
written about. By doing so, we acknowledge that the text exists in a
state between our first two choices, which might not have become an
issue if the Wikipedian had included in a reasonable time proper credit
to her/his source.

Note: my use of the plagiarism to denote unattributed reuse of wording
from another author falls within the understood use of that word. I
would like to point to http://www.indiana.edu/~istd/definition.html,
where the definition of plagiarism includes reuse of "ideas, words,
or statements of another person without appropriate acknowledgment".
Please carefully note the phrases "words or statements"; if someone
can trace the source of a Wikipedia article thru a simple Google search,
& there is no acknowledgement of the source, it is plagiarism, regardless
how extensively the orginal article is rewritten.

And this problem will recur whenever a Wikipedian adapts material
taken from another source, no matter where or how we draw the line between
"original content" & "copyright violation". I feel it is better to
acknowledge that there is a fuzzy boundary here, that the fuzziness
should be acknowledged -- but a decision must be made whether to
accept the problematic case into Wikipedia -- or delete it.

And yes, hard cases make bad law, but these are the cases that in the
end get sent up to someone with more authority to make a decision on.
I'd rather let a consensus of a large, informed & thoughtful group do
it, than a small few who don't reflect the opinions of the Wikipedia
community.

And if you are sick of listening to my tendentious whinging on this
matter, then go to the appropriate page & register that you either
agree or disagree with my opinion. Including the person who listed this
article as a copyvio, only 3 people have expressed an opinion about
the copyright status of this article: one person wants to remove the
article, another wants to keep it, & my comment wondering about its
status. If people add to the discussion, then I'll learn -- if nothing
else -- that I'm mistaken about this whole issue.

Geoff