[Wikipedia-l] Re: Copyright violations at download.wikimedia.org

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 5/31/05, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
> Based on my experience in patrolling WP.en I think you are a tad
> over-optimistic. What you see on WP:CP may only be the tip of the
> iceberg.

I would agree.
 
> I find plenty of copyvios that are several days old, and I've had to
> undo the work of weeks or months because some people just copy and
> paste stuff from other web sites (no, not WP mirrors) without being
> caught. That is a very unpleasant experience for everyone involved,
> especially if other editors kept working on the text in good faith.
> 
> The longer a copyvio remains unchallenged, the harder it becomes to
> catch it after several copyedits changed bits and pieces of it. That
> doesn't fix the copyvio, though. I had a case just yesterday where
> my reverting a copyvio was reverted again, and editors started
> "refactoring" the text to "mitigate" the problem.

My favorite en.wikipedia copyvio story:  Marked an image as copyvio on
the wp:cp page, two weeks later nothing was done, so I replaced the
image with a cruddy sketch just to get it out of the current
version... A few days later another wikipedian replaced my cruddy
sketch with another drawing (the first hit for the subject on GIS at
the time) and tagged as PD, saying in the summery that it came from a
state university webpage and was thus PD (!!?!). The image actually
came off some students home page, I contacted the student.. and the
image was not PD nor was the student the copyright holder. :)   ... So
far, every single copyright tag I've checked out on en has been
incorrect, although I've only checked out the suspicious ones, so it's
not a fair assessment.

With text it's even worse because our public editing process make it
much easier for someone to prove that our text was a derived work,
where in a more traditional medium a sufficient amount of refactoring
would usually manage to hide the violation.

With images I plan on just replacing all the ones with suspect
copyright (i.e. everything that isn't CC* or GFDL and uploaded by the
author, or with an actual letter attached that explicitly says PD or
an acceptable license) over time... but I have no idea how to solve
text.