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

[Lodewijk]

Marco: I agree, we had also issues on the Dutch Wikipedia - these have been
around for ages, the English Wikipedia is just less aware of them. Often,
copypasting in the same language is caught easily - between different
languages is much harder and persistent. There are many people, including
experienced editors, that think translating from random sources is OK. It
is no new problem, and chapters have indeed been working on getting this
understanding of what free licenses really mean more widely accepted in the
general audience. Not something that is easily measured of course.
Technical solutions sound great, but are only catching a small amount
inside the same language.

Steven: I understand this research was limited to the English Wikipedia
(where most of the plagiarism will be in the same language). It would not
strike me out of the realm of realism to assume this might be very
different for other languages than English. It also says little about the
problem in general of course.

For those who don't want to click on links to get information, it basically
says (simplification alert) that they don't have any indication that the US
& Canada education program makes the plagiarism problem on the English
Wikipedia any worse than it already is.

Anyway: I think this problem is more prominently there in non-English
communities, and that technical solutions are not going to be the answer
there. An educational answer is more likely to be successful, focusing on
explaining people how Wikipedia works and doesn't work, and what are do's
and don'ts. This doesn't have to be an education program like executed in
the US, but basically all outreach programs as executed by chapters, user
groups, thematic organizations or groups of volunteers can contribute to
this. This is already happening in most countries.

In some countries (like Germany ;-) ) politicians are doing the work for
us, explaining how evil plagiarism is and how it works by firing government
ministers over it :)

Best,
Lodewijk




2013/11/13 Marco Chiesa <chiesa.marco at gmail.com>

> On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 8:40 AM, James Heilman <jmh649 at 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)
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