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

[Steven Walling]

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 11:40 PM, James Heilman <jmh649 at gmail.com> 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. 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.
>
> 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.
>

Relevant info on the subject of copyvio is the recent plagiarism study by
the Education Program team. They looked different types of users (students,
newbies, experienced editors, admins) and compared them. Results were
published on Meta at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Plagiarism_on_the_English_Wikipediaand
also discussed in the last WMF Metrics & Activities meeting:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/2013-11-07

AFAIK this is the best data we have about how often different kinds of
editors close paraphrase or outright copy/paste.