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

[Michael Snow]

On 11/20/2013 8:31 AM, Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
> On 11/20/2013 07:13 AM, The Cunctator wrote:
>> Yes, let's keep on pushing for policies that drive away editors!
> Let's be clear here: contributions that are copyright violations are not
> desirable to begin with.  If someone is driven away because they cannot
> cut and paste from random websites anymore, I'm not sure that this could
> reasonably be taken to be a bad thing.
Not that I encourage us to be permissive about copyright infringement, 
but there are two potential aspects here. You've touched on the first, 
which is contributors who do the copying - if they are willing to 
change, that's fine, although I'm skeptical about the value of editors 
who "don't know any better" and certainly repeat offenders should be 
highly unwelcome. But the second aspect is the loss of tasks other 
editors may be able to participate in, if there's potential for 
overautomation of the review process and corresponding loss of human 
judgment (What needs to be removed and what could be fixed just by 
citing the source? How thorough a rewrite is necessary to avoid 
plagiarizing source text?). An essential part of collaboration is, after 
all, reviewing each other's work. From the terseness of the comment, it 
might be alluding to either aspect or both.

--Michael Snow