[Wikimedia-l] Copyright infringement - The real elephant in the room

[Matthew Flaschen]

On 11/13/2013 02:40 AM, James Heilman wrote:
> The Wikimedia Foundation needs to wake up and deal with the "real tech
> elephant in the room". Our primary issue is not a lack of FLOW, a lack of a
> visual editor, or a lack of a rapidly expanding education program.
>
> Our biggest issue is copyright infringement.

I don't really agree with that.  It is a serious issue, but I would put 
NPOV (in the face of active threats such as companies paying for 
publicity on Wikipedia) and growing the editor community higher.

We also have solutions to address it (not perfectly, true), both 
preventing the problem and dealing with it after the fact

* MadmanBot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MadmanBot) (mentioned at 
Wikipedia:TurnItIn, and a major technical tool against copyright 
infringement).
* Clear policies against copyright infringement
* Dealing with copyright violations 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_Copyright_Violations_101)
* Finally, the DMCA ensures the foundation is not liable as long as they 
promptly respond to notifications (which of course we want them to anyway).

> We have had the Indian program, we have had issues with the Education program, and I have today
> come across a user who has made nearly 20,000 edits to 1,742 article since
> 2006 which appear to be nearly all copy and pasted from the sources he has
> used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DrMicro#Copyright_infringement
> This has seriously shaken my faith in Wikipedia.

That is indeed disturbing, and I'm glad you found it.

> This is especially devastating as there is a tech solution that would have
> prevented it. The efforts are being worked on by volunteers here
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Turnitin and has been since at
> least March of 2012. We NEED all tech resource at the foundation thrown at
> this project. Other less important project like FLOW and the visual editor
> need to be put on hold to develop this tool.

I don't agree that all tech resources should be used for this.  However, 
there may be room for enhancing MadmanBot (e.g. as a GSOC or OPW project).

A significant problem with TurnItIn is that is proprietary, and can not 
be customized by anyone in the movement.  The fact that it is 
proprietary also means it can never be port of the main infrastructure, 
nor run on Wikimedia Labs.

Matt Flaschen