 | This article is substantially duplicated by a piece in an external publication. Since the external publication copied Wikipedia rather than the reverse, please do not flag this article as a copyright violation of the following source: | Additional comments |
|---|
Here is another case where an external site is publishing content similar to our own - the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce has an explicit copyright tag on this page - where evidence suggests that it evolved here naturally. The site is flagged 2014, and 2014 is the oldest current archive for the page (see). Beyond this, there is evidence of natural evolution of this content all the way back to the creation of this article in 2003. This is the lead of the external site:
Red Skelton was an American comedian who was best known as a top radio and television star from 1937 to 1971. Skelton's show business career began in his teens as a circus clown and went on to vaudeville, Broadway, films, radio, TV, night clubs and casinos, all while pursuing another career as a painter.
We see the lead sentence, starting with "Bernard Richard "Red" Skelton (July 18, 1913 - September 17, 1997) was an American comedian who started in vaudeville as a teen-ager, worked his way up to Broadway shows, secondary roles in MGM movies, radio performances and finally popularity in the early days of TV." placed in Wikipedia in June 2003. This had only minimal changes for years, when an IP rewrote the lead on 9 January 2006, to introduce what made Skelton notable in the lead:
Red Skelton ...was an American comedian whose greatest impact---in a career which began as a teen circus clown and graduated to vaudeville, Broadway, MGM films, and radio---began when he reached stardom with television's The Red Skelton Show (CBS, 1951-1970; NBC, 1971).
This is clearly moving to be more similar to the external site, but is still very different. This sat for some months until this edit on 10 July 2006 changed it to:
Richard Bernard "Red" Skelton ...was an American comedian who was most well known as a television star with The Red Skelton Show (NBC, 1951–1952, CBS, 1953–1970; NBC, 1970–1971). Skelton's show business career began in his teens as a circus clown and went on to vaudeville, Broadway, MGM films, and radio.
Again, a change that brings it closer to the source. Later the same day, a different editor modified that to read:
Richard Bernard "Red" Skelton...was an American comedian who was most well known as a radio and television star from 1937 to 1971. Skelton's show business career began in his teens as a circus clown and went on to vaudeville, Broadway, films, radio, TV, clubs and casinos, while also pursuing another career as a painter.
A minute later, he changed "most well known" to "best known" and added "top" to the description. At this point, the lead in our article is the same as the lead in the external site, but the information on his early life differs substantially. We see that evolving gradually and naturally as well, with edits such as this, this and this. Just as with the source above, we have to conclude from these signs of natural evolution that the content was created here on Wikipedia by multiple people and taken as a source by the website that also publishes the text - perhaps unaware that use of Wikipedia content without attribution is a violation of license. (See WP:Reuse.) --Moonriddengirl (talk) 23:55, 28 March 2014 (UTC)[reply] |
|
level-5 vital article is rated FA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
