Marco: I agree, we had also issues on the Dutch Wikipedia - these have been around for ages, the English Wikipedia is just less aware of them. Often, copypasting in the same language is caught easily - between different languages is much harder and persistent. There are many people, including experienced editors, that think translating from random sources is OK. It is no new problem, and chapters have indeed been working on getting this understanding of what free licenses really mean more widely accepted in the general audience. Not something that is easily measured of course. Technical solutions sound great, but are only catching a small amount inside the same language.
Steven: I understand this research was limited to the English Wikipedia (where most of the plagiarism will be in the same language). It would not strike me out of the realm of realism to assume this might be very different for other languages than English. It also says little about the problem in general of course. For those who don't want to click on links to get information, it basically says (simplification alert) that they don't have any indication that the US & Canada education program makes the plagiarism problem on the English Wikipedia any worse than it already is. Anyway: I think this problem is more prominently there in non-English communities, and that technical solutions are not going to be the answer there. An educational answer is more likely to be successful, focusing on explaining people how Wikipedia works and doesn't work, and what are do's and don'ts. This doesn't have to be an education program like executed in the US, but basically all outreach programs as executed by chapters, user groups, thematic organizations or groups of volunteers can contribute to this. This is already happening in most countries. In some countries (like Germany ;-) ) politicians are doing the work for us, explaining how evil plagiarism is and how it works by firing government ministers over it :) Best, Lodewijk 2013/11/13 Marco Chiesa <chiesa.ma...@gmail.com> > On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 8:40 AM, James Heilman <jmh...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > Our biggest issue is copyright infringement. We have had the Indian > > program, we have had issues with the Education program, and I have today > > come across a user who has made nearly 20,000 edits to 1,742 article > since > > 2006 which appear to be nearly all copy and pasted from the sources he > has > > used. > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DrMicro#Copyright_infringement > > This > > has seriously shaken my faith in Wikipedia. > > > > Back in 2007 we found out a user on it.wp, a former sysop, with more than > 40,000 edits that used to copy-paste from his sources, often outdated. He > was banned, and the community made a great effort to cleanup the articles > he contributed to (and damn it was hard, because those articles had a long > history after his edits). And in the following years, we had other similar > cases, you can find a selection here: > https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progetto:Cococo/Controlli_conclusi > There are bots that go and look whether a newly inserted block of text is > already present somewhere else, it doesn't find everything (of course it > won't find things copied from a printed book), but sooner or later serial > copyviolers get caught, and the fall from hero to zero is sooo quick. > > At the end of the day, I think copyvios have always been taken seriously, > so that I don't remember big problems with that, while there have always > been more problems with libel, privacy, and editor retention. > > > Marco (Cruccone) > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>