Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/Darius Dhlomo/How to help

If you restore a copyright violation, you will be held responsible for that violation, as if you had written the text yourself. Systematic reinstatement of copyright violations will lead to permanent loss of editing privileges.

This CCI case

CCI pages
Copyright policy
On this page

You can help clean up articles suspected of copyright violations resulting from the Darius Dhlomo contributor copyright investigation case. All contributors with no history of copyright problems are welcome to contribute to clean up. A 'bot has blanked the article. There are, in summary, three things that happen at this point:

• If and only if the article is verified to be entirely free from any copyrighted non-free content, the blanking of the article by the 'bot can be simply reversed. Please make a note at the article's listing at the CCI subpage that you've done so, signed with four tildes, so we can keep a record of the cleanup. You can generally easily locate the specific listing by following "What links here" in the article toolbox.
• If the article contains copyrighted non-free content, but there's other entirely independently written content in the article, the article can be restored minus the infringing content and any content that was based upon it. Please note that you have done so at the CCI subpage.
• If the article contains solely copyrighted non-free content, it can be flagged by using the normal {{
  db-copyvio
  }} tags. The article will then be deleted, as appropriate, by an administrator. There's also a streamlined tagging process that is specifically for this cleanup effort.

You can help with this. This is the procedure.

It is helpful, where possible, to identify the copied source. Unfortunately, it's not really simple to review for copyright violations in this case.

) only caught a few of the many articles that turned out to have been copied wholesale from other people's writings. Here are some tips:

• In many cases, there will have been an external link to the publication that was copied in an early revision of the article. Look at the article's edit history, and review the earliest revisions by Darius Dhlomo.
• Some external publications no longer exist on the World Wide Web. However, we have had some success with the Wayback Machine in locating the WWW pages.
• In some cases Darius Dhlomo copied entire sentences at a time, but simply placed them in a different order. If you are using a WWW search engine to search the WWW for original works that were copied, note that this will affect your success if your search strings span multiple sentences.
• In some cases Darius Dhlomo changed pronouns to proper nouns and vice versa. Be aware that if an article says "[Named person] XYZ." the original work may have said "He XYZ." or "She XYZ.", and vice versa.
• Not all WWW search engines are equal.
  Bing
  and Yahoo, for example, can sometimes find the copied sources that Google cannot. And vice versa.

An inability to find a source does not prove that copying did not happen. In this case, all substantial prose added by this contributor is likely to have been copied. Wikipedia:Copyright violations notes that "if contributors have been shown to have a history of extensive copyright violation, it may be assumed without further evidence that all of their major contributions are copyright violations, and they may be removed indiscriminately."

Please note that even if a non-free copyrighted piece of prose has been copyedited, added-to, modified, and expanded, the entire result is a

and is still a copyright violation that has to go. Only prose that is entirely independently written, with no basis in any copyright violation, can remain to be restored to an article. If there's no such content in the article, then the entire article has an improper foundation and must be deleted to be restarted from scratch.

Please note that you become responsible for any content that you choose to restore that turns out to be a copyright violation. Please act with diligence and care. If you mass-undo blankings without careful review, and it transpires that you've restored copyright violating content, then you will be treated as a mass copyright violator.

Detailed procedure

Entirely non-infringing articles

If and only if you verify an article to be entirely free from any copyrighted non-free content, or any content derived from infringing content, you may simply reverse the blanking of the article by the 'bot. Please note in your edit summary that you have thoroughly checked for copyright violations and found none. Please also make a note at the article's listing at the CCI subpage that you've done so, signed with four tildes, so we can keep a record of the cleanup. You can generally easily locate the specific listing by following "What links here" in the article toolbox.

Articles where there is independently-written original non-infringing text

If the article contains copyrighted non-free content, but there's other entirely independently written content in the article, then you may restore the article minus the infringing content and any content that was based upon it. Don't restore infringing content, or any derived work based upon it. (Don't put it in an edit summary, copy it to a talk page, or copy it anywhere else, either.) Note in your edit summary that there is infringing content that you have not restored, so that future editors months and years from now are aware of what happened by reading the edit history. Please make a note at the article's listing at the CCI subpage that you've done so, signed with four tildes, so we can keep a record of the cleanup. You may also place {{subst:cclean|url=http://…}} on the article's talk page to notify others.

Articles that are unredeemable

If the article contains solely copyrighted non-free content, and derived works, it must be tagged so that an administrator will delete it. You can use the normal {{

}} tags to do this.

There is also a streamlined process that is specific to this cleanup effort. This process applies only to articles that have been tagged as problematic in the first place. Administrators will reject on sight any attempt to use this process for any article not tagged as part of this cleanup process.

If you wish to participate in this cleanup effort more extensively, there are several resources available.

Special:RecentChangesLinked/Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/Darius Dhlomo/Created articles list

If you wish to watch for articles being unblanked, notices being removed, and articles being edited, The-Pope kindly provided this page with a list internal links to of all of the articles, whose related changes list will show changes to the articles listed.

Category:Articles tagged for CCI copyright problems

If you wish to review and handle further articles, this is a list of the articles that are still blanked with the notice.

If you are interested in reviewing articles from particular categories (for example

, or update this page with your recommendations.