[LINK] Wikipedia Critic Finds Copied Passages

andrew clarke mail at ozzmosis.com
Thu Nov 9 02:04:29 AEDT 2006


On Wed, Nov 08, 2006 at 11:04:17AM +1030, Glen Turner wrote:

> 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.

Points taken, although I suspect a large majority of the plagiarised
text in Wikipedia articles is straight-out copy+pasted text from other
web sites, so as far as the Wikipedia owners are concerned it is
foremost a copyright violation, because it is presumably a bigger legal
risk.  That would gel with the "matches" referred to in the SMH article.

The lack of attribution you describe is a lot harder to detect,
especially if the original source of the plagiarised work (not
necessarily text) is not in a digital format...



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