[WikiEN-l] In defence of the minor edit

[Carcharoth]

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 7:51 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29 January 2010 01:35, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> (Incidentally, a fair number of the unsourced BLPs are in fact
>> copyvios, and when I see that, I speedy deleted on that ground, unless
>> it seems important enough to rewrite. )
>
> Take care there - I increasingly see website bios that are basically
> the Wikipedia bio copied, 'cos they liked it!

This is especially the case if the initial draft of the biography was
reasonably well done and did not change much or at all for the next
few years. One of the ways to normally check which came first is to
see if the Wikipedia article has evolved naturally from a stub to
something longer, but Wikipedians writing adequate bios from scratch
can incorrectly get accused of copyvios if the Wikipedia page is
copied without attribution, especially of the person republishing it
without attribution doesn't give a publication date.

*We* have a date for each version of an article, but some sloppy
websites don't give dates for what they publish, or even a credit line
for whoever is claiming credit for the writing, so it is difficult to
see what came first. The worst cases are when supposedly respectable
publications and writers do this (e.g. newspapers and journalists),
but those are rarer now.

But yeah, lots of stubby BLPs are bios, sometimes directly copied by
the subject themselves (or a friend or fan) from the subject's own
website or from a website they (even as the subject) have no
permission to copy.

Carcharoth