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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Some revisions, like this and that, copied this source. George Ho (talk) 02:04, 19 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

RD1 wording

There is a discussion at WT:Revision deletion#RD1 wording regarding WP:Revision deletion#1, Blatant copyright violations. Flatscan (talk) 05:15, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The issue should be resolved here - not that I think it a big one, for that matter, but I think the intended effect is to say that while using RD1 when cleaning up is best practice, not doing it isn't a sin either. What we can't have is an instruction set that suddenly. Until the WMF says otherwise, a bad edit buried in a page's history constitutes "removing from public view" and that should be enough. With the massive and mounting backlogs of potentially problematic contributions at WP:CCI, what we certainly don't need is to create a compulsion to RD1 every single bad edit identified since WP:CP became institutionalized. MLauba ^(Talk) 10:15, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If RD1 is best practice, every editor that finds a copyvio would have to find an admin to do a revdel, a ridiculous increase in wikiworkload; overall, it's not like there's a surfeit of active admins. Simply reverting a copyvio is a longstanding practice. While list attribution is allowable, individual attribution is better. Best solution would be to simply remove RD1 -- how does it make Wikipedia better? NE Ent 10:51, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Best practice doesn't preclude "normal practice". In this specific case, "normal practice" is removing the copyvio, "best practice" is removing and revdel. What I don't want to see is if an admin goes the extra mile and revdels a copyvio he removed, he then gets dragged to ANI over it for no good reason. MLauba ^(Talk) 11:05, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Personally, I am more inclined to rev-delete when the copyright issue is extensive and/or seems likely to find its way back into the article, or when it is recent and removal harms nothing. I think it's important to balance the value of easily searched history with risk management. :) I don't revdelete every copyright issue I remove, but try to use common sense to determine when removal is (a) trivial or (b) worth it. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 01:48, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I concur with common practice not precluding best practice, but in this case we have the luxury of doing both concurrently. No harm is going to come to anything by having a copyvio in the edit history; worse case scenario is WMF gets a DMCA takedown notice -- and even in those instances a simple revert suffices: e.g. [1]. If there's a history of, or a significant likelihood of, an editor edit warring to restore copyvio material then revdel would be a reasonable per MRG. NE Ent 02:50, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No harm is done either way, but the point is, admins who add RD1 to a clean-up action shouldn't be dragged to ANI over it - we happen to have this present discussion for that exact reason. MLauba ^(Talk) 11:53, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"No harm is going to come to anything by having a copyvio in the edit history" is unfortunately not true, NE Ent. :/ They come back, as I explained at Wikipedia_talk:Revision_deletion#RD1_wording. Your "worst case scenario" does raise the question, though, of what people think is the reason for removal of copyrighted content. The risk you speak of is an important one, of course - the protection of movement funds. But legally speaking, like YouTube or Facebook or Fickr, WMF is not required to remove copyrighted content at all unless they receive a DMCA takedown notice. The community does it anyway because doing so is responsible and ethical and serves our greater mission of creating educational content that can be used and modified by anyone anywhere. Copyright issues impact copyright holders and reusers, some of whom may not be able to simply edit it out with no (or trivial) expense. Legal protection of WMF and our editors is an important aspect, but other important risk management considerations here are damage to copyright holders (whose content may be widely disseminated in a way that is not easy to address) and to our reusers. This is what i believe needs to be balanced against transparency. I wouldn't want rev-deletion to become required for copyright cleanup. But I also wouldn't want to see any barriers put in its way. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 12:30, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with MLauba's edit to WP:Copyright problems/Header#Suspected or complicated infringement. Flatscan (talk) 05:07, 21 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Could we centralize discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Revision_deletion#RD1_wording? NE Ent 00:28, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No, because nothing you said or posted there persuades me that the RD1 criterion's wording needs any changes, whereas here we have some room for improvement. If you want to centralize, this is the right place. MLauba ^(Talk) 10:01, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Article copied from within Wikipedia

If an article completely comprises of content copied from another article without attribution, what to do in such a case. According to the Copying within Wikipedia guideline it violates Wikipedia's Copyrights policy, so can such an article be considered a CSD#G12 case? And if not how to proceed in such a case? I am talking about Shivani Financial article, I first reduced the content that I found copied from FXCM article but later realized the complete article was copied. -- SMS ^Talk 19:16, 29 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

CWW violations are rarely deleted as G12 because they can be fixed (WP:Copying within Wikipedia#Repairing insufficient attribution) without admin intervention. I have seen a few deleted by that criterion; the ones I remember involved substantial duplication, either of an existing article (CSD A10 or WP:Content forking) or of a user draft taken without permission. In the draft case, the original author decided to move his or her draft to article space, and the copy was deleted. Regarding Shivani Financial, I see notifications of the 2011 G11 of Shivani Financial Forex Trading Consultancy at User talk:Aftab222000. It seems like a straightforward delete at WP:Articles for deletion. Flatscan (talk) 05:30, 30 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Copied and pasted articles and sections

Just a reminder that as we don't have a working bot at the moment copy and paste taggings aren't being listed here so this category is slowly filling up. Presumably the close paraphrase category is as well. I will try to spend some time on it but as I've just started a new job I'm not sure how much time I'll have. Dpmuk (talk) 18:32, 30 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Seeking assistance

I am seeking assistance on House of Dlamini. I stepped in to try and moderate an edit war that stems from a claim of copyvio which seems to have been going on for years. See Talk:House_of_Dlamini#Edit_warring - it is a long thread and I have only just managed to get an answer about where the infringement stems from [2]. Even then it is complicated, but basically much of the information up to the 1980's may trace back to Burke's Peerage, though the formatting and wording suggests it has been copypasted from the website. More recent information has been researched by the webmaster (User:Royalty2012).

The question really is where is the fine line between using information from a website and creating a copyright violation? Is it just the layout and wording, or in this case does the extent of the data (99%) used impact the situation. Does User:Royalty2012 have any better claim to the content of the information he has researched and published, or just the layout of it?

I really would appreciate broader assistance with this issue and a way forward. --Derek Andrews (talk) 14:20, 31 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

CBRE Philippines

Dear Copyright experts: Investigating an old Afc draft led me to this article of the same name which appears to have a large amount of copyvio from:

as well as smaller sections from many other pages on the company's web site. It appears that all of the text was copied from the site and then some parts were edited to be third person, more concise, etc. How much of a web site needs to be in violation of copyright before the whole thing is speedily deeleted? I deleted the Afc draft rather than historymerging it, because it was all copyvio. —Anne Delong (talk) 00:59, 1 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I just G12'd it, every single bit from the first two revisions was copied from http://www.cbre.com.ph/about-us/ or other pages accessible from the menu in the left. Changes to the article since then were minor and didn't add any new material worth keeping (if any at all). The fact they were edited makes no difference in this instance (and indeed most instances) as it is still a derivative work. Dpmuk (talk) 01:24, 1 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks; I was pretty sure that it wasn't worth keeping, but I am happy for the second opinion. —Anne Delong (talk) 05:36, 1 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Aegukka

A user requested to RevDelete the revisions of Aegukka containing the song's lyrics [3]. I realized, however, that a very large number of revisions contain the lyrics, so it might be unfeasible to RevDelete them all. Posting here for review. decltype (talk) 19:41, 6 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Unrelated matter

A previous editor noted in 2010 that in the article on Durkheim [4]much content is copied from Britannica. After that, some one has edited the page to include a reference to the Britannica article and apparently rephrased some sentences. However, the article seems to contain many complete sentences and paragraphs from the Britannica article. Is this copyvio or not and what should be done? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.214.173.46 (talk) 09:54, 10 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Copyright concerns at Definitions of pogrom

This article consists entirely of " a list of scholarly, encyclopaedic and other notable definitions of the term pogrom, in chronological order". During a recent AfD (now closed as 'no consensus') I suggested that there might be copyright issues, and accordingly am raising the matter here, where hopefully those familiar with copyright policy and guidelines can give their input. The problem is that it consists to a great extent of direct quotations, largely from sources which are presumably still copyright. It seems to me that this may well exceed what might reasonably be considered 'fair use', in that it isn't extracting part of each definition from each source, but quoting it in full, or substantially so, with no further analysis: effectively just mirroring the source definitions. Are my concerns valid, or am I being over-picky? It certainly isn't normal Wikipedia practice to compile an article or list almost entirely from quotations, and my reading of Wikipedia:FAQ/Copyright suggests that there may be legitimate grounds for disallowing such extensive quote-compiliation. AndyTheGrump (talk) 09:28, 13 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Three other articles should be considered as part of this debate

To my mind the fair use rationale is:

The articles are explicitly comparing and contrasting the various definitions for what are complex words. This is a Transformation (law)
We are not presenting these definitions as the views of wikipedia. They are explicitly referenced to their original sources, allowing readers to critique the differences and thereby advancing knowledge
That so many definitions are presented side by side diminishes the focus on any one quote
Scholarly debate around the definition of these words are common, and it is typical for scholarly works on the subjects to quote a variety of third party definitions when introducing the topic

Oncenawhile (talk) 10:17, 13 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It could well be argued that the other articles aren't all directly comparable, but I can certainly see the merit in looking at them as well. AndyTheGrump (talk) 11:57, 13 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'd say your concerns are quite valid, AndyTheGrump - as it is, there's nothing explicitly transformative here. If there were an essay comparing and contrasting the different definitions, then the use of the content would be more defensible, but right now that's not what this is - it's just a list of quotes. It might be an implicit comparison, Oncenawhile, but to be explicit it would need to be stated by definition. :) I would hazard a guess that the scholarly works you mention actually provide context for the quotes rather than simply reproducing them. Beyond that, several of those quotes are long enough to be potentially problematic in their own right - with the worst at a glance being footnote #17, at 434 words. There is no specific word count at which use becomes substantial, but we seldom use more than a few sentences; for a standard academic work, 434 words is slightly more than a full page.[5] It's important to remember here that we are not judging our use of non-free content against US fair use laws, but against our internal policy and guideline which is deliberately constructed to be more restrictive for a number of reasons, including that we cannot rely on context to establish fair use. Our website is licensed for reuse (including commercially) for any purpose by anyone, and we do not push the boundaries of fair use. To conform with our internal policy and guideline, the longer quotes should be truncated with a combination of spotlighted quotation as needed and paraphrase and context material should be added. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 11:45, 20 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks Moonriddengirl. That makes a lot of sense to me. Andy, would truncation satisfy your concerns? We can add prose context from the secondary sources too. Oncenawhile (talk) 11:50, 20 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Given that you have now nominated Definitions of pogrom for deletion, in what seems to me to be a clear violation of WP:POINT, I can see no purpose in discussing this with you. I'm not interested in playing silly games. AndyTheGrump (talk) 13:27, 20 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@@ Line 90: / Line 90: @@
 :::I'd say your concerns are quite valid, [[User:AndyTheGrump|AndyTheGrump]] - as it is, there's nothing ''explicitly'' [[transformation (law)|transformative]] here. If there were an ''essay'' comparing and contrasting the different definitions, then the use of the content would be more defensible, but right now that's not what this is - it's just a list of quotes. It might be an implicit comparison, [[User:Oncenawhile|Oncenawhile]], but to be ''explicit'' it would need to be stated by definition. :) I would hazard a guess that the scholarly works you mention actually provide context for the quotes rather than simply reproducing them. Beyond that, several of those quotes are long enough to be potentially problematic in their own right - with the worst at a glance being footnote #17, at 434 words. There is no specific word count at which use becomes substantial, but we seldom use more than a few sentences; for a standard academic work, 434 words is slightly more than a full page.[http://gettingpublished.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/how-to-calculate-book-length/] It's important to remember here that we are not judging our use of non-free content against US fair use laws, but against [[WP:NFC|our internal policy and guideline]] which is deliberately constructed to be more restrictive for a number of reasons, including that we cannot rely on context to establish fair use. Our website is licensed for reuse (including commercially) for any purpose by anyone, and we do not push the boundaries of fair use. To conform with our internal policy and guideline, the longer quotes should be truncated with a combination of spotlighted quotation as needed and paraphrase and context material should be added. --[[User:Moonriddengirl|Moonriddengirl]] <sup>[[User talk:Moonriddengirl|(talk)]]</sup> 11:45, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
 ::::Many thanks Moonriddengirl. That makes a lot of sense to me. Andy, would truncation satisfy your concerns? We can add prose context from the secondary sources too. [[User:Oncenawhile|Oncenawhile]] ([[User talk:Oncenawhile|talk]]) 11:50, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
+:::::Given that you have now nominated Definitions of pogrom for deletion, in what seems to me to be a clear violation of WP:POINT, I can see no purpose in discussing this with you. I'm not interested in playing silly games. [[User:AndyTheGrump|AndyTheGrump]] ([[User talk:AndyTheGrump|talk]]) 13:27, 20 February 2014 (UTC)