Talk:MV Elwha

Copyright problem removed

Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: http://m.kitsapsun.com/news/1999/Sep/09/orcas-island-ferry-elwha-rams-dock-strands/ and http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19960810&slug=2343449. Infringing material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.) For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences or phrases. Accordingly, the material may be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you. Dpmuk (talk) 18:24, 5 February 2012 (UTC)

Why have you deleted the sentence starting with "The incident stranded"? I cannot see the word "incident" nor the word "stranded" in the source webpage. You write above that "the material may be rewritten". Isn't that sentence rewritten and therefore admissible on Wikipedia? Teofilo talk 23:03, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

The source you quote is not one I was aware of - I removed the material based on it's similarity to the two sources quoted above and the fact that it was all inserted by one editor. As an example "made an unauthorized swing into Grindstone Harbor to give an Orcas Island resident a waterside view of her home from the Elwha's wheelhouse" which is an exact copy apart from the insertion of the ship's name. It is possible that some of the sentences are indeed OK, however I decided that removing some and leaving others would leave a very odd section that would likely not make sense in many places. If sentences are original they can certainly be used in any re-write although I'd suggest it would be easier just to start again from scratch rather than check every sentence. Dpmuk (talk) 23:45, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

The problem is that by removing this sentence you seem to enforce a standard that is so high that it became practically impossible to extract information from any source, thus blocking any development or starting again of this article. I think it is your responsibility, as an admin to check which content is OK and which isn't, and to remove only those contents which aren't. I would not say so if you edited the article as a simple user. But you are an admin and you applied Template:Cclean containing the wording "persistent violators will be blocked" which paralyses subsequent users from undoing what you did. If you do not restore the content that is OK, I think I am going to refer this talk to the community with a request for comments or a dispute resolution procedure asking if it is an acceptable action to remove a whole section instead of removing only the content that is not OK, and applying Template:Cclean to the OK content that was removed. This point of view of mine is based on my experience on Commons. On Commons, we never delete a user's pictures that are OK, even if we deleted a number of other pictures from that user that were not OK. Teofilo talk 16:12, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

I should say that I'm not an admin although I am active in copyright work and am a clerk at WP:CP, where adding the copypaste tag would've listed this if it were not for a broken bot. I disagree that it is up to the person removing the text to check every sentence. I checked enough of the text to know that removal of the copyright content would leave a meaningless section with hanging sentences that did not connected with other sentences. Leaving the copyright text was not an option due to the potential legal problems and so I removed it all, the copyright text because of that issue and the rest as an editorial decision. Yes, in an ideal world I'd have like to have spent some time and re-wrote the section but there is currently a 120-article backlog of copypaste tags and I'm the only editor regularly dealing with it so I make no apologies for not doing so. I do take your point about the cclean template and with hindsight I probably should have left a note explaining that not every last sentence was a copyvio but that such a significant proportion were that their removal would leave nothing meaningful. Given that we've now had this conversation here it should be clear to any editor that that is the case. I suspect you're already aware but in case you're not I'll also point out that it does not have to be a word-for-word copy to be a copyright problem. There were many sentences that, while not identical, I thought were too close to the original. All that said I am obviously open to me actions being reviewed. User:Moonriddengirl is an experienced admin and generally acknowledged copyright guru and I'm sure would be happy to take a look. Alternatively you could post at WT:CP if you wanted review by editors used to dealing with copyright problems. You are of course also welcome to follow any other course of your choice. Dpmuk (talk) 19:45, 8 February 2012 (UTC)