Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-04-24/Special report

Some of you may recall from James Heilman’s previous article that we now have a copyvio detection bot, User:EranBot, that checks prose additions over a certain size for copyright violations using Turnitin / iThenticate. Edits that come back positive are listed at User:EranBot/Copyright/rc for human follow-up. I have been working on assessing these bot reports since December 2015.

EranBot is highly useful, as people are being notified immediately or within a few days that their edit is an unacceptable copyright violation. For repeat / egregious violators, I follow up by monitoring the user's edits, and block if necessary. My hope is that early detection and warning will prevent the introduction of additional serial copyright violators like we have seen in the past and curtail the need to open further cases at the ridiculously backlogged WP:CCI (which has a five-year backlog of 155 cases, 76,218+ articles as of 7 April 2016).