[LINK] Wikipedia Critic Finds Copied Passages

[Glen Turner]

andrew clarke wrote:

> It may be that the Wikipedia user who contributed the text to this
> article considered the information on the US government site to be in
> the public domain.  It is my understanding that this is true for at
> least some US government publications, ie. there is no copyright.
> 
> Perhaps it would've been a non-issue if the user employed a bit of
> "creative writing" to rewrite the plagiarised text - enough to be an
> original composition - before they submitted it.  Of course there is
> still nothing stopping someone from doing that in future.

Hi Andrew,

Copyright and attribution have differing objectives.

Even if copyright allows the reproduction of a work in Wikipedia
that doesn't remove the desirability of attribution the source
of the text and information.

Plagiarism is a lack of attribution. It is not traditionally
related to copyright, [The "moral rights" of copyright are
an attempt to allow a lack of attribution to be corrected
through the copyright laws, but that is a weak right when
the information in the work is being reused rather than the
work being reproduced.]

Even "creative writing" should still acknowledge the source
of the information.  See any text on plagiarism and
paraphrasing.

Wikipedia claims to be an encyclopedia, so it shouldn't be
plagiarizing material but attributing its sources fully.

Cheers, Glen