[WikiEN-l] Pattern copyvios involving comic book characters

[Rory Stolzenberg]

Have we looked through the history of all the copyvios to see if it's the
same guy doing this? If so, we can just block him and revert, and it's not
too bad. If not, then we really do have a serious problem and we're going to
have to go through a lot of pages of comic book characters in the near
future. I'll help out with the cleanup if needed, and I promise not to AfD
anything.

On 10/18/06, The Uninvited Co., Inc <uninvited at nerstrand.net> wrote:
>
> No idea how we're going to unravel this one.
>
> We have received, over a period of months, numerous reports to OTRS
> regarding copyvios from the www.marvunapp.com web site.  That site
> publishes character summaries for scores of comic book characters
> ranging from the well-known to those obscure figures that make only
> cameo appearances.  The summaries are written by a fairly small number
> of contributors to the the site and are generally not edited once they
> are posted.
>
> Their site content is making its way to Wikipedia.  There are three
> problems:
> a) Cut and paste copying of text
> b) Paraphrasing of text
> c) Unattributed copying of images the site has scanned from comic books
>
> (a) and (b) are copyright violations.  The problem goes back at least
> six months and is ongoing.
>
> (c) while not strictly speaking a copyvio since marvunapp.com is merely
> making scans of flat art, is upsetting the site operators due to the
> volume of material involved and the lack of attribution.  If left
> unaddressed (c) is likely to make them more pedantic about their rights
> regarding (a) and (b).  So far they've been pretty understanding and
> supportive, considering.
>
> Right now we don't know the extent of the problem because we've only
> investigated cases that the marvunapp.com people have reported, which
> cover perhaps a couple dozen pages all together.  I've investigated a
> couple myself and it is very time consuming since often there is just a
> paragraph or two in the middle of a longer Wikipedia article that's a
> copyvio and the use of paraphrasing makes automated tools unhelpful.
> Addressing these in a meaningful way is difficult because ongoing edits
> after the copyvio leads to a badly polluted page history that no one
> wants to delete, and I've ended up having my removals reverted over the
> course of time by people who show up two weeks later and don't realize
> when and why the text was removed, so they re-add it from the history.
>
> The copyvios have been added by more than one user, probably because
> unrelated people trying to expand our comic coverage have found
> marvunapp.com so helpful.
>
> I've asked for some help on WP:AN/I and so far no real takers although
> there at least has been support for my block of one of the perps.
>
> Here's what I think needs to be done:
>
> * The pages marvunapp.com has reported to us need to be reviewed by
> experienced editors and any copyvios found and dealt with at least in
> the current version of the page.
> * Ideally, the history should be purged.  In cases where this isn't
> practical, notes should be left on the talk page so that people don't
> erroneously assume they can re-integrate content from the history.
> * The perpetrators should be re-educated about how big of a deal this is
> and how much work it is to clean up.
> * Pages where marvunapp.com was used as a reference should include
> marvunapp.com in the list of references.
> * Images taken from the marvunapp.com should be properly attributed even
> if copyright doesn't apply.
> * If we ever get everything else done, we would want to try to be a
> little more vigilant in going through the comic articles ourselves
> rather than waiting for the marvunapp.com people to report them.
>
> Volunteers for all this drudgery should be IMO selected from a pool of
> people who still believe that the main deciding factor in
> inclusion/deletion debates should be the cost of hard disk space.
>
> The Uninvited Co., Inc.
> (a Delaware corporation)
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>