[Wikipedia-l] cut/paste

[Larry Sanger]

From: <rose.parks at att.net>
>      I was responding directly to the post by Mr.
> Pobratyn. He said:
>
> I have a bit of a moral dilemma here: some articles on
> wikipedia seem to pop-up non-wikified and written
> slightly 'too well'. It seems obvious that
> it is a copy/paste job from another source. What should
> we/I do in such a case? Delete it?
>
>      I take plagiarism extremely seriously and many
> members of Nupedia, at least, know that. For the same
> reason, I take an unsupported claim of plagiarism
> extremely seriously and consider it a dangerous move.
>
>      Mr. Pobratyn cited as the basis for his suspicions,
> articles that appear, I guess, full-blown, unwikified,
> and written "too well."

For fear of seeming not to let other people speak for themselves, I won't
presume to interpret anyone else, but just give my own opinions.  My own
opinions happen to be very close to the way I'd interpret what Wojcek wrote,
though.  Basically, I regard one of my basic "jobs" (never assigned by
anyone except myself, though) on Wikipedia to check for plagiarism/copyright
infringement.  How do I do this?  Basically, I look at the RecentChanges
page, and if there are any new names or numbers there, I check their work
fairly carefully.  Very often, it's obvious that what they wrote wasn't
cribbed from somewhere else ("Why would anyone post to the web what they
have written?  It's not too good").  But sometimes, particularly from new
people, I'll see a full-blown article appear, written quite well, and that
makes me instantly suspicious.  :-)  Why?  Just because too often in the
past we've seen new people posting copyrighted articles.  **Obviously**,
it's not because I think no one writing for Wikipedia is capable of writing
anything very good.

So what I do when I come across a good article from a new person is just
what Jimbo does--check it on Google by finding a string of words unlikely to
appear in any other article, pasting it into the Google search form
(surrounded by quotes).  I do that with two or three different strings of
words, just to be sure.  If I find nothing, then I grudgingly admit that the
article was probably not plagiarized from an online source.

Of course, even if an article is (1) good and (2) copied from another
source, that doesn't mean that it is plagiarized.  Someone might have copied
it from her own work, for example.  Grand!  Wonderful!  Thanks!  None of the
above-described procedure and (quite prudent, I'd say) supporting opinions
controvert the wonderfulness of that practice.

Now, suppose I do find an instance where an article was obviously copied
from an Internet source.  Do I immediately scream plagiarism?  Almost
always, but not necessarily: I try to make a point of checking to see if the
original was released under some sort of open content license, or was public
domain.  Usually, of course, there's no indication that it was, so I do
scream plagiarism.

Who should remove the plagiarism spotted?  Whoever spots it first.  Might
this not constitute an insult to the person who put the article up on
Wikipedia?  What if that person wrote the original?  Well, that's
interesting.  It could happen.  We could, I suppose, make a habit of asking
politely, "Say, did you just happen to plagiarize this article?"  But many
plagiarists are too embarrassed by being caught, too clueless, or too just
outright dishonest, so it seems reasonable not to expect an answer to such a
question.  So suppose we have a dozen plagiarized articles on Wikipedia with
polite questions, "Say, did you plagiarize this?" appended to them.  I'd
rather have a dozen removed articles, with notices saying, "I found this
article at [URL].  I found no evidence that it was free or public domain.  I
am assuming that this was an instance of copyright infringement.  Please do
not paste copyrighted material into Wikipedia!"

This is something that anyone can and should do.  I *totally* agree with
what Lee Crocker said here:

> > There is no such thing as an "administrator" in Wikipedia in the
> > sense of someone responsible for its content, nor should there be.
> > Nupedia has those (and should); Wikipedia just has us, and we are
> > just as responsible for its content as anyone else.  It does have a
> > few folks to set policy, but even they have been very respectful of
> > the community process of content creation and not tried to subvert it
> > by establishing "control" or "ownership".  Further, it is obviously
> > impractical to have an infintely scalable content-creation method
> > with non-scalable editing and expect to keep up.  Wikipedia CANNOT
> > work unless EVERYONE is an editor and administrator as well as an
> > author.

In the last four days, it has been difficult (to say the least) for me to
get on the net.  (Actually, it would have been rather easy, if I had known
what to do!)  I, and other people responsible for making sure Bomis doesn't
get into legal trouble over copyright violation, was relying on Wikipedia
participants to keep the steady stream of new people honest.

Notice, there is no one claiming to be editor-in-chief or even editor of
Wikipedia.  A wiki, by its design, doesn't need one.  Wikipedia needs people
to act as "gardeners" (in Jimbo's metaphor).  The reason Wikipedia is so
successful at creating content is that there aren't any editors standing in
the way of content creation.  This means there's a lot of garbage that needs
cleaning up, and the whole thing is a work-in-progress, but a lot work *is*
done, and we *do* have a lot of very good articles and many that are
improving.

Larry