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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Sadalmelik (talk | contribs) at 07:28, 11 April 2009 (→‎Military matters: response to Nick-D). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Possible copyright infringement
If you are here because an article has been tagged with the "Possible copyright infringement" template, please note that this tag is serving as a placeholder for situations that cannot be swiftly cleaned. There is no intention to delete articles investigated in connection with this widespread copyright concern, but to revise them to remove infringement. The purpose of the tag is to prevent Wikipedia's publishing copyrighted material without proper licensing in the meantime. If you'd like to assist in this clean-up process, please read the instructions below and feel free to ask questions. Thank you. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 13:28, 8 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Copyright problem
If you are here because an article has been stubbed and its talk page left with a "Copyright problem" notice directing you to this page, you may wish to review the two administrators' noticeboard discussions of the matter, here and here, as well as archives of this page for more information. This clean-up project is dedicated to cleaning up thousands of articles created by an editor who has pasted material onto Wikipedia from books and non-free internet sources. Efforts have been made to keep at least basic information on these subjects as well as to preserve contributions by other editors, but it is possible given the scale of this effort that some information has been removed that should have been retained. If creative text contributed by you or another editor than User:GrahamBould to one of these articles has been inadvertently removed, please restore it. If you are able to verify that material placed by User:GrahamBould does not violate the copyright of a previously published source through direct duplication or close paraphrasing, it may also be restored, but please do so with caution. Not all of the sources used by this contributor are easily accessible, and there have been cases of infringement located where the sources were not referenced in the article. If you are able to expand these stubbed articles, either by properly utilizing the already cited sources or drawing on others, please do. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 18:14, 10 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]


Information: Subpage: the history of this CopyVio event [1]

Gastropod articles: Subpage listing additional suspected CopyVio gastropod articles by GB, UPDATE: as of early April 2009 there are still quite a number that need checking and copyvio deleting, see the list on this page: [2]

Other articles: Here is a list of every article (other than Category "Molluscs of New Zealand" that GB contributed to. The list is organized by size of the largest edit made by GB. [3].


This subpage is for communications related to organizing clean-up efforts on the extensive copyright infringement issue raised on March 13, 2009. The articles that are affected by this include 1,000 within the Gastropods Project and other mollusk classes, but also well over a thousand on other topics including Fish. The cleanup of Category:Molluscs of New Zealand and Category:Molluscs of Australia is complete. Efforts are underway to organize evaluation & cleanup of other articles and categories.

If you would like to start working on fixing up the CopyVio articles right away, first read the "Instructions for volunteers". Despite good intentions and enthusiasm, please do not simply follow your own impulses, instead please try to follow the basic plan we agree upon here, so that we all know what is going on. We are guided in our plan by Wikipedia:Copyright, Wikipedia:Copyright problems and Wikipedia:Copyright problems/Advice for admins. As this situation is unusual, the response has necessarily evolved as we go.

If you are a gastropod specialist who wants to check gastropod articles for copyvio and possible clean-up, please check the page and list here: [4]. Bear in mind that a great deal of the copyvio was taken from books which are not available on-line, and thus googling for a phrase and not finding it is not sufficient to ensure that it is not copied.


List of willing participants

Please add your username if you are interested in helping. If at some point in the future you lose interest in these tasks or are unable to persevere because of other priorites, please remove your name from the list; you can always add it back on again later.

Instructions for volunteers

  1. Pick a letter category or subcategory from the list below and put your username next to it to indicate it's been taken.
  2. Review the related articles at Category:Articles tagged for copyright problems (ignoring those articles that are not related to this clean-up project)
  3. Check each article's history. If all text is by User:GrahamBould, stub the article. (Ex: "The fish is a fish type of the genus genus found in place.") Creative text introduced by other contributors can remain, unless it is twined with text by GrahamBould in such a way that it can't be separated.
  4. Edit the article talk page to include {{subst:User:Moonriddengirl/sandbox}} The template added to the article talk page explains why the text was removed. It will automatically include your signature. Please be sure to "subst" the template.
  5. Give yourself a brief pat on the back and move on to the next article.
  6. When you finish your letter category or subcategory, check it off with {{y}}.
Questions about exact phrasing
Right now the only one of us who has a copy of the relevant mollusk book(s) and fish books is User:Geronimo20 who has been given them by User:gadfium. If you need to check to see if a phrase is copied from one of these books, ask Geronimo [8] if he will do this for you. (By the way, as a general rule of thumb, if a phrase seems elegant and a little bit antiquated, it is quite likely to be copied from one of the older books.) Invertzoo (talk) 17:27, 18 March 2009 (UTC) Tweaked Invertzoo (talk) 22:14, 27 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Actually I am retaining these books – not just for a week. Ayling's Collins Guide to the Sea Fishes of New Zealand is used for a significant proportion of fish artices, and Compagno's Sharks of the World (which I don't have) is used on some shark articles. --Geronimo20 (talk) 12:25, 26 March 2009 (UTC) Revised in the light of Invertzoo's tweak above --Geronimo20 (talk) 23:03, 27 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Letters and letter sections

Sharks and Compagno

Hi all, I started work on Flabellina species yesterday and then came across the GB discussion. Just to let you know, I have both

  • Compagno, Dando, & Fowler, Sharks of the World, Princeton University Press, New Jersey 2005 ISBN 0-691-12072-2
  • G M Branch, C L Griffiths, M L Branch, & L E Beckley, Two Oceans, A Guide to the Marine Life of Southern Africa, (David Philip Publishers (Pty) Ltd, Claremont, South Africa 1994) ISBN 0-86486-250-4

and if you'd like to check any possible copyvio with me, please feel free. Seascapeza (talk) 06:37, 1 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  • Of the four you asked to be checked, the only one that copies Compagno is the Lined Lanternshark.

The African Angelshark is fixed, and both the other articles directly contradict Compagno on several important points such as depth found and max length. Seascapeza (talk) 06:45, 2 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Fish locations

I have some difficulty trying to paraphrase the locations of fish. Take, for example, "the redbait is found off South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the south west Pacific". This is a kind of list. The locations can be reordered, and little changes can be rung in a descriptive phrase like "south west Australia", such as "south western Australia" or "west south Australia". But these cosmetic changes seem very trivial, and you can't really get away from the root words. Is it reasonable to treat a string of locations like this as simliar to say a species list, and not really a copyright concern, or what? --Geronimo20 (talk) 20:47, 26 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

IMHO these sorts of mini lists that follow a natural sequence - for example the one you quoted could be categorised by a geographic direction (in this case west to east), a particular type of list which I have often used when writing about the distribution of fishes - can not reasonably be claimed to be copyright unless it uses an unusual wording. Similarly for alphabetical lists, or lists in some other order, perhaps size or in order of year of discovery etc. I think the key here is whether it is simply a list or sequence of purely factual information rather than containing some sort of narrative or at least required intellectual creativity of some sort by the author. In your example the locations are just the names of places and no one can claim copyright for names in common use. Of course I stand to be corrected by those more knowledgable than I about copyright law... - Nick Thorne talk 05:45, 29 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Australian Fish Articles

Hi guys, any of the articles affected by that BD copyvio issue that are in the Category:Freshwater fish of Australia come into my area of interest. I have a reasonable library on the subject and am happy to re-write these articles in a non copyvio but properly referenced manner. I am very busy with work at the moment, but I will get to them as I can. If there are any paticular questions about any of these articles, please feel free to leave a question on my talk page, or on the talk page of the article in question, as I have them all on my watchlist. - Nick Thorne talk 22:16, 28 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

List of affected Australian freshwater fish articles:

Please feel free to add other relevant effected articles to this list, or the one on my user page. Nick Thorne talk 12:16, 9 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm keeping an eye out in those articles I'm cleaning, but I haven't noticed anything yet. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 12:21, 10 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
There's five more created by GB. There are probably some articles he has edited but AWB cannot handle more than 25,000 edits. – Sadalmelik ☎ 16:43, 10 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Moving forward

As far as the articles created by GB, this should be the current status:

  • 950 articles in Category:Molluscs of New Zealand, Category:Molluscs of Australia and their subcats are clean. Not all of these were started by GB.
  • 1,000 fish articles - of these roughly 2/3 has been checked and sorted out
    • roughly 350 fish articles remain tagged as copyvios, and either use Ayling or Compagno as reference
  • Around 240 gastropods and 70 molluscs which were not in the above mentioned categories still remain. Most of these are genus articles, but some are species articles and contain text from Powell. Some of them has been cleaned up, possibly by people working on one of the several ContributionSurveyor reports.
  • Finally, ca. 300 various misc articles, which on cursory glance seem to also contain infringing material. A fair number of genus and higher order articles, though. The number also contains some molluscs, which did not contain a direct link to Mollusca, and probably gastropods too without a link to Gastropoda. I should probably sort out these again...

So there's still roughly 1,000 articles to clean ;) But first, how will we continue with the articles that are currently tagged as copyvios (from Ayling and Compagno)? – Sadalmelik ☎ 13:28, 5 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It seems like a consensus approach may be necessary. Unless we can get scads of contributors with access to those books to help evaluate those 350 fish articles in a timely fashion, we may need to stub them to remove potentially infringing text. This would allow publication of something, at least, and let contributors in those areas address the issues at a more leisurely rate. If we go that route, a temporary template to explain the problem could be placed at each talk page. I should have time to dedicate to that process. We're trying to get a dispatch out on plagiarism which has been somewhat consuming, and meanwhile I've been distracted by several other massive copyright infringers. :) (It never stops!) Thoughts? --Moonriddengirl (talk) 11:29, 7 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Barring other opinions, I am leaning towards stubbing with a note of explanation at the talk pages. But I would be pleased for feedback, agreeing or otherwise. :) --Moonriddengirl (talk) 13:07, 8 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Based on what I've seen of GB's contributions, it's very likely that these articles are in fact copyvios. Stubbing will allow an article to exist as a base for expansion without violating copyright. This also keeps the information available in the article history so that if it is established that there is no copyright violation, we can easily bring that version of the article back (without administrator action). So, I support the stubbing action. -- Whpq (talk) 13:26, 8 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Stubbing sounds ok to me, too... There's probably very little content we would be able to salvage even if we all had the books. At least that's my expression based on the usage of various on-line sources, though they are also easier to copy verbatim. – Sadalmelik ☎ 07:40, 9 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

←All right. I have a new template at User:Moonriddengirl/sandbox. Does this cover the situation adequately, do you think? I'm a bit hesitant in linking "rewriting" to Wikipedia:FCDW/Plagiarism, which is set to run this weekend. It offers good advice on how to revise material to avoid plagiarism which is equally useful in revising material to avoid copyright infringement. Thoughts? --Moonriddengirl (talk) 12:40, 9 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The comments on plagiarism and the pointer to the new essay seem excellent to me. Standardising the note is also important, because it makes it easy to locate the affected articles later with a simple search.--Geronimo20 (talk) 13:00, 9 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Then I propose, barring any other ideas, that we list the letters of Category:Articles tagged for copyright problems above so people can choose. Not all of these are fish articles, but it should be obvious as we go. We stub the articles and place the template at the talk page. If there's general agreement on this, I'll clear out the old instructions at the top and replace them with this. Good? :) --Moonriddengirl (talk) 23:42, 9 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds good to me --Geronimo20 (talk) 01:39, 10 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Instructions added. If there are problems with them, please fix or let me know. :) --Moonriddengirl (talk) 02:33, 10 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Next steps

The clean-up on the copyvio-tagged articles seems to be going relatively quickly. Based on User:Sadalmelik's note in the section immediately above, this will leave about:

  • ~240 gastropods/70 molluscs, many of which are genus articles but some of which need cleaning
  • ~300 misc. articles, some of which are genus & higher order articles.

Sadalmelik, are you able to sort these into handy lists? :) --Moonriddengirl (talk) 12:25, 10 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The list is here. The categories are not very accurate, there are few hominids among gastropods and molluscs etc, but at least all the articles should be there. Some of them have already been fixed or checked by people working from DistributionSurveyer lists. One of the misc articles I checked was Alpheus bisincisus, but the reference database has migrated to another domain and is not redirecting. This should be the current address (very slow site...).
Once all these articles have been handled, we probably should ask Dcoetzee to run his script once again excluding all the articles either started by GB or otherwise checked. There won't be many contributions left, I think. – Sadalmelik ☎ 16:30, 10 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
That's what I like to hear: optimism! :D --Moonriddengirl (talk) 18:14, 10 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm moving some comments to the new section at the bottom, for clarity.

Instructions, next phase

I've written these in advance in case the clean-up of the above finishes. Please, anyone, when that alphabetical list is done, replace those instructions & that alphabetical list with the ones below. And, of course, if I've got something wrong in the below, fix it or let me know. :D --Moonriddengirl (talk) 18:28, 10 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  1. Pick a subcategory from the list below and put your username next to it to indicate it's been taken.
  2. Review the related articles in your subcategory at User:Sadalmelik/Others—some of the articles have already been checked (see this list for details)
  3. Check each article's history. If all text is by User:GrahamBould, stub the article. (Ex: "X is a genus of Y in the family Z."; "A is a species of B in the family C located in D.")
  4. Edit the article talk page to include {{subst:User:Moonriddengirl/sandbox}} The template added to the article talk page explains why the text was removed. It will automatically include your signature. Please be sure to "subst" the template.
  5. Give yourself a brief pat on the back and move on to the next article.
  6. When you finish your subcategory, check it off with {{y}}.
  7. If every subcategory in a division (Gastropods, Molluscs, Other) is completed, remove the division from the list below.

Letters and letter sections

Gastropods

User:Sadalmelik/Others

  • G1
  • G2
  • G3
  • G4
  • G5
  • G6
  • G7
  • G8
  • G9
  • G10
  • G11
  • G12
  • G13
  • G14
  • G15
  • G16
  • G17

Molluscs

User:Sadalmelik/Others

  • M1
  • M2
  • M3
  • M4
  • M5

Other

User:Sadalmelik/Others

Some of the articles in this section can be quite different from the articles cleaned so far. If you are uncertain how to proceed with an article, blank it with {{subst:copyvio|url=see [[Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Gastropods/Subpage for organizing CopyVio Cleanup]]}}
  • O1
  • O2
  • O3
  • O4
  • O5
  • O6
  • O7
  • O8
  • O9
  • O10
  • O11
  • O12
  • O13
  • O14
  • O15
  • O16
  • O17

Military matters

Some of the articles in others-category are rather long... Battle of Kufra, Pillbox affair, Italian submarine Barbarigo (well, this one was not started by GB, so it not listed here), Marcello class submarine, Maungatautari Restoration Project etc. I suppose we could let the people at MILHIST to join in the fun, too. – Sadalmelik ☎ 19:32, 10 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

So much for optimism. :) Maybe we should separate out the "Others" section and work first on familiar terrain. We can invite MILHIST to come join us. While we should stub molluscs & gastropods as we go, we obviously would not want to do that to articles that have been extensively edited by others. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 19:47, 10 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
And, yes, there are problems. The cited source, in snippet view: [9]. Our article: "By good fortune there was every prospect of a ministerial reshuffle in the offing." Major unhappy sigh. I'll notify the project. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 19:54, 10 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it might be best to leave that section later. Most of them are still various creepy crawlies, but there are few totally different, too. We could sort out the typical stubs first, and then see what's left. – Sadalmelik ☎ 20:13, 10 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Do you have something automated to help you separate out military articles from the "other" list? That could be very helpful. :) --Moonriddengirl (talk) 20:18, 10 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
No, sorry. I have used AWB to make these lists, and it has 25,000 article/contribution limit. – Sadalmelik ☎ 20:23, 10 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Well, we could ask whoever takes a section in the O to separate out military articles into a new division. Finding infringement in those may be challenging. I had to go to google books and search there to pick up the snippets that proved infringement in the one article. A general google search may not be productive. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 20:27, 10 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the notification. Are you expecting many more military history articles to be added to the list at User:Sadalmelik/Others? Nick-D (talk) 23:52, 10 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(unindent) That list is complete but only for the articles he has started. I tried to spot the military articles from User:Dcoetzee/ContributionSurveyor:GrahamBould and came up these:

There is probably few more down the list, and I might have missed some, but we'll see once the animals have been finished. – Sadalmelik ☎ 07:28, 11 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

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