Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Lithuania

This is the talk page for discussing WikiProject Lithuania and anything related to its purposes and tasks.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Shortcut

WT:LITHUANIAWT:LITHUANIA

Archives: 1, 2, 3: 3 months

Archives

This page has archives. Sections older than 90 days may be auto-archived by if there are more than 4.

New topic - new section please. It would be much easier to communicate and not mix things.

Possible copyright violations by User:JorkaSSS

It has recently come to my attention that many edits by JorkaSSS (talk · contribs) are very closely based on articles from the Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija (Universal Lithuanian Encyclopedia, VLE). In these edits, JorkaSSS adds direct sentence-by-sentence translations of text from VLE. The translations may not be exact word-for-word matches to the original Lithuanian, in part because English sometimes requires a different grammatical structure, but they are certainly quite close.

VLE does not seem to be licensed under a Wikipedia-compatible free license. Its Terms of Use prohibit the reproduction or distribution of its content without the publisher's consent. A translation would count as a derivative work and would therefore also be prohibited without express permission from VLE's publisher, the Science and Encyclopaedia Publishing Centre.

Here are some examples of affected articles, taken from JorkaSSS's most recent 100 edits (since mid-June). The byte differences include added references and other formatting, not just prose, but they still serve as a rough estimate of the amount of translated text.

Kvass (+800 bytes, diff)
Grass snake (+2,500 bytes, diff)
Skalvians (+2,800 bytes, diff). Pre-existing (uncited) content in "History" section was overwritten.
Midsummer (+3,200 bytes over the course of 3 edits; the first paragraph is not copied from VLE)
Saint Jonas's Festival (+4,100 bytes, diff; the first paragraph is not copied from VLE)
Lithuanians (+45,000 bytes over the course of 15 edits, with small edits by others in between)

I am not posting this to chastise JorkaSSS. I believe that JorkaSSS is editing in good faith and is unaware that there is any problem with their approach to adding content. They have been doing the same thing for years without receiving any talk page warnings or other pushback. From what I have observed, JorkaSSS always adds an inline citation to VLE when translating from it, which at least shows that they aren't trying to hide the source.

I have not checked all of their edits in detail, but this problem has been going on since at least 2023. It would be a good idea for someone to go through their edits, especially the large additions on Lithuania-related articles, and check which ones need to be flagged as copyvios. I'm not sure what the next steps would be, whether to try to rewrite the translated sections to the point that they are no longer derivative of VLE, or to just remove them outright.

(Also, although they haven't been as active on lt.wikipedia, I found one instance where they copied two long paragraphs verbatim from VLE and another instance where they copied one paragraph.)

- 98.170.164.88 (talk) 04:19, 1 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Direct translation (without any rewording) seems problematic. Perhaps JorkaSSS is unaware of this. I suggest raising this issue at Wikipedia:Copyright problems. -- Mindaur (talk) 21:37, 30 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Posted on Wikipedia:Copyright problems/2025 October 15. 98.170.164.88 (talk) 05:59, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@98.170.164.88 and Mindaur: Are there any other translationvio before June? (I don't know Lithuanian so I can't check) Tenshi! (Talk page) 21:34, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Tenshi Hinanawi: It's going to be time consuming to find them all; unfortunately, I don't have time to pursue this now. However, the IP user mentioned that the potential copyright violations have been going on for several years ([1] – Oct 2023). I can find even an earlier case: [2] (June 2022). On the other hand, the editor's change from less than a week ago [3] is based on VLE, but appears to be sufficiently rewritten and reworded, to the extent that it's arguably not a copyright violation. So, perhaps not all material referencing VLE is problematic, but I'd say all edits involving Lithuania and vle.lt as a reference should be checked. -- Mindaur (talk) 22:11, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You don't need to check all their edits, but I'd recommend giving the diffs you've found here and a few others from non-recent vios and requesting a CCI case since this is likely a systemic issue. Tenshi! (Talk page) 22:19, 15 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have requested a CCI. Tenshi! (Talk page) 18:29, 19 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Tenshi Hinanawi: Thanks for looking into this case so thoroughly. I see that you have even identified some instances where material was directly translated from sources other than VLE, which I had not noticed. I guess that might mean that all non-trivial content additions (more than a sentence or two?) will have to be checked. Luckily this user has always been very good about citing their sources, which should make this task easier than it would otherwise be.

FWIW, I also saw JorkaSSS's recent edit to Lithuanians, which added back some valuable information on the diaspora, citing VLE but without directly translating it (even explicitly writing "non-copyvio" in the edit summary). That seems to be a good sign that the user now understands the issue and will make good edits going forward. 98.170.164.88 (talk) 05:46, 20 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Lithuanian declension

Please fix the multiple issues tagged. This is urgent, because it was proposed for deletion – and could be nominated for deletion imminently. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. Bearian (talk) 03:48, 23 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Great Lithuanians fringe theories

It appears that an editor created Great Lithuanians that includes theories promoted by Litvinist editors. The page mainly links to Belarus-related pages. – sbaio 05:02, 30 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Agree: there are no English or Lithuanian sources covering such concept whatsoever, so it is arguably either WP:FRINGE or WP:OR. The question is whether the article should be nominated for deletion or the term described as a Litvinist concept (assuming it meets WP:N). -- Mindaur (talk) 14:58, 30 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If there are Yugoslavs, Soviet people and British people, why not Polish–Lithuanian identity? Bildete (talk) 15:47, 30 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We are not discussing the Polish–Lithuanian identity. The article in question is "Great Lithuanians". -- Mindaur (talk) 16:50, 30 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Article on cultural sector protests in Lithuania

I think it would be valuable to have an article on the recent cultural sector protests against Dawn of Nemunas.

There is already a little bit of info on Ignotas Adomavičius, but the protests are continuing even after his resignation, and they have been covered in plenty of news articles, so I think they are a notable and distinct topic. 98.170.164.88 (talk) 05:18, 16 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Infoboxes has an RfC

Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Infoboxes has an RfC for possible consensus. A discussion is taking place. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you.

Proposed deletion of Litvinism

There is a discussion to delete Litvinism, which can be found at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Litvinism. – sbaio 06:08, 9 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]