Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-03-29/From the archives



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  • It's not as uncommon as people may hope. While reading Geoffrey Barton (2017), The Tottenham Outrage and Walthamstow Tram Chase, one chapter seemed particularly familiar; it was a verbatim copy of the section of the Immigration and demographics in London section of the Siege of Sidney Street article I'd taken to FAC the day the year before. - SchroCat (talk) 18:26, 29 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • About 10 years ago, the local Historical Society ran a series of articles in their printed newsletter on the local tiny communities. As a member of the organization, I received copies of the newsletters in the mail (quarterly, iirc). About halfway through the first article, I realized I knew this information, I recognized the writing style, I knew THE WORDS! Boy, was I surprised to find the Wikipedia article I had personally written being used word for word by the local historical society and being claimed as their own work! They ran several articles one at a time in each newsletter for a dozen or so newsletters, never with any attribution to Wikipedia. Since then I have seen the same on Facebook more times than I can count because no one cares, it is too easy to copy and paste it and claim the credit for themselves... - Adolphus79 (talk) 20:28, 29 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Here's a blog post that was recommended to me by Google algorithms, turns out it had pieces of the semi-obscure article I wrote, Waterfall furniture, written word-for-word. I posted in the comments a few times, all deleted, before privately contacting the primary author, who decided to put in a link and reword at least... ɱ (talk) 21:14, 29 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Circular sourcing only continues to be a larger potential problem. The worst part is it's usually only easy to detect by the primary authors of the wikipedia pages. Aside from paying attention when content is audited, I'm not sure of any real solution that presents itself besides running plagiarism checks and seeing when the Wikitext dates from. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs talk 21:43, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • What I really dislike about relatively reliable sources taking information from Wikipedia and not crediting it is that, if the information (e.g. the birthdate of a football player) is quite hard to find and can only be found in that RS and Wikipedia, I'm always afraid that I accidentally cite WP:CIRCULAR without knowing it. God damn, that annoys me. Cite your sources, people! —Biscuit-in-Chief :-) (/tɔːk/ – /ˈkɒntɹɪbs/) 16:11, 31 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • William Burges (Architect) “by” Lambert M. Surhone (who specialises in this approach) is a complete lift of the WB article. It used to retail on Amazon for more than Mordaunt Crook’s book! KJP1 (talk) 13:48, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Half a decade ago, when I took a series of Audie Murphy articles to FT, his biography from Wikipedia - word for word, punctuation, etc. - ended up in the newspaper of a smallish Texas town ... and the owner of the newspaper had put his byline on it. No credit to Wikipedia, he just claimed it as his own work. I vaguely remember posting a shocked comment on Jimbo's talk page about this. So, the last few years, I've collaborated on Hawaiian history subjects, bios, etc. In particular, those related to the Hawaiian monarchy. I have too much self respect to claim full credit on those works. Wish I could say the same for those who give interviews on a given subject, sounding a lot like Wikipedia's text. Sometimes I see new books on subjects of forgotten Hawaiian history, and am fairly certain when I read them that someone used Wikipedia as a source, without crediting it. About all I can say ... is that Wikipedia is well read. — Maile (talk) 17:55, 4 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Tangentially: The reputation of Wikipedia in academia often seems to be that it is...not good enough for either students or the "unwashed masses"...and so we continue to fail our students, our youth, and the public by failing to teach them digital literacy skills. Like other literacy skills, better to teach people how to use sources than to reject them wholesale. For example: to be suspicious of gossip rags because they often publish on crazy deadlines and have little to no editorial oversight, to go back to the original scientific paper the mainstream news piece links to evaluate their methods and how far we can actually extrapolate, to place works of literature like The Little Red Book in their proper historical context and not take them at face value. An even looser analogy: guardians of underage teens of course prohibit their children from drinking but (should) tell them to please call for a ride if you indulge. Even more tangentially (secantly?), it annoys me when someone attributes to Wikipedia but doesn't even put an access date. Misplaced anger: I can't help but see a broader pattern of people not understanding that Wikipedia is a dynamic document, so the sentence you took from it may not be there anymore when I'm reading it. Then comes the despair that people are using a source without understanding its strengths and its pitfalls. With this article, I see that ignorance doesn't discriminate between PhDs and the "unwashed masses" (and wow, doesn't the latter phrase rank of contempt). Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 16:20, 8 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • The oddest one I came across was on a planning application to support the demolition of a disused chapel in the village of Dunton Green in Kent. The authors of the Design Statement for the houses which would replace it had thoughtfully provided an appendix listing all the nearby churches and chapels in that area which could in theory be used as an alternative. Copying and pasting the entire 120KB of List of places of worship in Sevenoaks District—images, references, wikitext and all—was an interesting way of doing it! That reminds me – I really ought to finish off that list... On a separate and more reasonable note, rarely a day goes by when one or other of the online local newspapers in my home city of Brighton and Hove does not use one of my public-domain Commons photos to illustrate a story or to provide a thumbnail image alongside the headline. Hassocks5489 (Floreat Hova!) 22:14, 17 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Great story. Thanks for writing it up! --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 08:02, 26 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]