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

[Marco Chiesa]

On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 8:40 AM, James Heilman <jmh649 a gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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.
>

Back in 2007 we found out a user on it.wp, a former sysop, with more than
40,000 edits that used to copy-paste from his sources, often outdated. He
was banned, and the community made a great effort to cleanup the articles
he contributed to (and damn it was hard, because those articles had a long
history after his edits). And in the following years, we had other similar
cases, you can find a selection here:
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progetto:Cococo/Controlli_conclusi
There are bots that go and look whether a newly inserted block of text is
already present somewhere else, it doesn't find everything  (of course it
won't find things copied from a printed book), but sooner or later serial
copyviolers get caught, and the fall from hero to zero is sooo quick.

At the end of the day, I think copyvios have always been taken seriously,
so that I don't remember big problems with that, while there have always
been more problems with libel, privacy, and editor retention.


Marco (Cruccone)