Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2010-12-06

This Halloween, Wikipedia unwittingly featured a truly scary article on the main page: a copyright violation produced by a member of the Arbitration Committee. After generating a large amount of buzz, the incident led to the replacement of the featured article and the retirement of an Arb (see Signpost coverage). Just a few weeks before, another long-time editor was indefinitely blocked and over 10,000 articles were blanked because of copyright violations (see Signpost coverage). With copyright policy garnering headlines so frequently, we decided to ask WikiProject Copyright Cleanup for some insight into copyright policies and how editors can avoid getting in trouble. We interviewed Moonriddengirl, MLauba, and Physchim62.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Copyright Cleanup?

MLauba: One of the articles I had on my watchlist was deleted for a reason or another, then recreated and slapped with a

WP:SCV

where the bot tracks its reports. It was under a huge backlog (in reality, it always is), so I got started on clearing it. After about 30 entries, I thought it might be a good idea to have someone validate what I did, and that's how I ended up on the WikiProject.

Moonriddengirl: After getting my tools, I focused on

WP:CCI

, and the few cases I had stumbled upon were hosted in my userspace! I was hoping that the project would bring more members than it has, but I still regard it as successful. New people find us now and again, and we've got some regulars who pull together well in keeping the various boards up to date. (That said, I am in perpetual recruitment mode. Come on aboard!)

There's been a lot of buzz about copyright cleanup recently. Could you provide some insight?

MLauba: Copyright is something that is perceived as complex, and many editors and admins shy away from anything that has "copyvio" attached to it. To wit, most of the ANI reports mentioning copyright issues tend to remain very short in nature - the two recent cases that stick to mind are completely out of the ordinary.

Out of the practice of cleaning up text copyright issues I believe all of us are aware that there is a staggering proportion of our content that has been borrowed from third parties, most of it in good faith. But to much of the community, this realization came as a shock - the first time due to the sheer volume of contributions to check, the second time because it was an arbitrator affected. And on the latter case, we also had an article that went through two article review processes, DYK and FAC undetected.

Last but not least, the problem was exacerbated because the whole thing was erroneously labeled as plagiarism when it was actually a copyvio. Plagiarism is a particularly loaded term in many circles, most notably academia.

Physchim62: The [cleanup] buzz comes in waves, roughly one per academic semester. This semester it's copyright violation because we had two pieces up on the Main Page over the Halloween weekend, in separate sections, that were contrary to Wikipedia's copyright policy. Next semester it might be

verifiability

(again). The important thing is that these issues serve as a wake-up call for all editors that our quality control procedures are not perfect, and indeed never will be. The challenge is to keep copyright issues (and BLP, and verifiability) in the back of editors' minds even when there isn't a "WikiScandal" going on. The problems don't go away just because no one's shouting about them!

What does the project do? What is your role in the project?

MLauba: The project does three things: offer a discussion space for people seeking advice on copyright issues, centralize tools and processes used in copyright cleanup, and discuss new initiatives in terms of processes, practices and guidelines.

In terms of roles, there aren't any real roles in the project, but I am one of the people who come up with ideas for tightening up processes and documentation from time to time. And of course normal cleanup activity, mostly at

WP:CP

, when I have time left to do so.

Moonriddengirl: Narrowing specifically to the first point of MLauba's response, the project offers a place for people interested in helping out with copyright problems to go to learn procedures and seek feedback. My personal goal is to help welcome new people to copyright cleanup and be available to provide what guidance and assistance I can as they learn the ropes.

How does copyright infringement and plagiarism affect Wikipedia?

MLauba: First, there's a point to clarify. Copyright infringement is a legal term, and deciding whether a copyright infringement has happened or not is a complex matter left to the courts. If we were ever to be found in infringement by a court of law, the first hit is of course the reputation of the project, but in terms of liabilities, the WMF is subject to a so-called "safe harbor provision" for copyright matters: it acts as a repository of data but not as a publisher. This would mean that in the end, the defendant in a copyright lawsuit raised against Wikipedia wouldn't be the WMF, but the editor who copy / pasted content without permission.

If you remember about a year ago, there were some headlines because several thousand images from the British National Portrait Gallery were imported onto Wikipedia, an act legal under US laws but not necessarily in the UK. If that matter would have proceeded to the courts, it would almost certainly have been brought against the uploader.

Our

copyright

policy defines the notion of "copyright violation" or copyvio for short, and it has been designed on purpose to be much more stringent than what current US jurisprudence recognizes as actionable copyright infringement. And there are two reasons for that. The first is obviously to protect both our editors and our content - by being much more strict than what the current legal practice requires, we minimize risks to our editors, but beyond that, we also future-proof the encyclopedia. Indeed, the trend those past two decades has been to tighten copyright laws in favour of copyright holders, so by having a large margin of progression, we hope to avoid a situation where Congress passes new laws that suddenly renders a large portion of Wikipedia illegal.

Then there's the second reason, and the most important one. Our mission is to create a free repository of knowledge, and material copyrighted to third parties is not free - it is essentially not ours to give away. And that's the primary reason why copyright cleanup is absolutely essential to Wikipedia.

Plagiarism is a different matter, an ethical one. Here the impact is first and foremost to our reputation. Plagiarism is a failure to attribute content to their authors, to give credit where credit is due. It is taking someone else's work and passing it off as our own. Attributing text we have copied from a free source is essential in terms of credibility, to distinguish between what is our work and what is from another person's labour. And to look at the broader picture, our own licenses to reusers are quite broad, but the one thing that we require is attribution, that if you take our content and re-use it, you must state that you got it from us. Plagiarism makes us hypocrites, who would want to hold our re-users to a higher standard than what we hold ourselves to.

Moonriddengirl: To what MLauba says, I would add that copyright infringement also has impact on our content reusers. Wikipedia could have been published under full copyright; it isn't. We're under a license that permits liberal reuse, even commercially, for a reason: we want our content to be reused. Among the core values of the Wikimedia Foundation we find the following: "An essential part of the Wikimedia Foundation's mission is encouraging the development of free-content educational resources that may be created, used, and reused by the entire human community. We believe that this mission requires thriving open formats and open standards on the web to allow the creation of content not subject to restrictions on creation, use, and reuse." We are here, in part, to be reused. While the WMF has safe harbor, not all of our reusers will. While the WMF can simply pull copyvios when these are identified, some of our content reusers utilize print, which may be difficult and costly to retract. If we do not ensure that our content is free, we risk damage to them and more, to their trust in us and our content. If they cannot trust that our content is free, why would they risk reusing it? We compromise our values and our mission.

Beyond the global concerns, there is also the direct damage copyright problems do to our articles and to our editors. I've seen literally thousands of articles (I don't want to think about how many thousands) come up for copyright review. I've had to delete many; in many others, I've had to chop out content or roll them back sometimes years to the last clean version before the article was tainted. Our contributors waste their time polishing something we can't retain. How discouraging it must be to discover that the article you've spent hours copyediting is an unusable derivative work! In addition to the time lost working on articles with copyright problems, more time is needlessly wasted in cleaning them up. We would all be better off if we could just put that energy from the beginning into creating content we can keep.

How can editors help you with the project? What do you recommend for users who need to clean up their own articles?

Moonriddengirl: Pitch in! We have a project subpage full of instructions:

WP:CCI

with which we can list your major edits to articles...all of them. You can conduct your own CCI so you can identify problem areas and clean them up.

Next week, we'll focus on some

• Lincoln cent (nom), the fourth in Wehwalt's numismatics series. He says, "The Lincoln cent may not be worth the zinc it's struck on today, but upon release, thousands of people lined up across the country to get it.... there's an interesting story behind it."
• Iridescent
  says, "Each year at Easter, the elderly and widows of the small town of Biddenden (and a large crowd of tourists) gather for a free handout of bread, cheese, tea and biscuits imprinted with a picture of conjoined twins, in a ceremony which has gone on for at least 300 and possibly as many as 900 years."
• Canadian heraldry (nom), an interesting hybrid tradition. Nominator (Roux says, "Derived mainly from heraldic traditions in France and the United Kingdom, Canadian heraldry incorporates distinctly Canadian symbols, especially native flora and fauna, references to the First Nations and other aboriginal peoples of Canada."

Featured lists

In the past two weeks, ten lists were promoted:

• 1st Academy Awards (nom) (nominated by Tbhotch)
• List of Cincinnati Reds Opening Day starting pitchers (nom) (Rlendog and Wizardman)
• List of Fab 40 number-one singles (nom) (Rambo's Revenge)
• Latin Grammy Award for Best New Artist (nom) (Jaespinoza and Another Believer)
• List of songs in Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock (nom) (Masem)
• List of Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves recipients (1940–1941) (nom) (MisterBee1966)
• Novice7
  )
• Adabow
  )
• List of Buso Renkin episodes (nom) (DragonZero)
• Jesse Owens Award (nom) (The Rambling Man)

Featured pictures

• Violet black-legged robber fly (nom), or Dioctria atricapilla (created by Richard Bartz).
• Noodle snacks
  ) The nomination survived complaints about the bird's anus ("a little too front and center").
• Noodle snacks
  said "I've spent many hours trying to get a Pink Robin photo. They are shy birds and don't usually make any noise, so are difficult to spot.... This is to be expected for a temperate rainforest bird." The photo was taken in technically challenging conditions (1/10 sec wide open at iso 1600) (picture at right).
• Calopteryx virgo (Richard Bartz
  ; picture at right).
• Mallard (nom; link to article), showing marked differences between male and female (Richard Bartz; picture below).

Information about new admins at the top is drawn from their user pages and RfA texts, and occasionally from what they tell us directly.

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2010-12-06

New case: World War II

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By Ohconfucius

The Arbitration Committee opened one case this week, leaving a total of two cases open.

New case

World War II

On 30 November, the arbitrators accepted a new case petitioned by Communicat (talk · contribs), who alleges that "NPOV/content issues are consistently evaded, deviated from and obscured" by editors at the Military History Project. Five other editors are joined as parties to the case. Arbitrators Kirill and Roger Davies, both "coordinators emeritus" of the project, recused themselves.

Old cases

Longevity

On the petition of John J. Bulten (talk · contribs), the Committee accepted a case on Longevity on 22 November. The filer named 18 editors, including himself, as parties.

Reader comments

2010-12-06

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By TheDJ

Commons Upload Wizard

The new "Upload Wizard", featured a number of times in recent editions of The Signpost, was launched on Wikimedia Commons last Tuesday. The new wizard was developed under a one year grant from the Ford Foundation and aims to improve the upload experience, especially for novice editors. It allows users to upload multiple files at the same time, add the proper licensing and sourcing information and will only allow them to publish the file to the public if they have properly completed all the steps. It also features the new licensing tutorial (see previous Signpost coverage), to help novice users determine if their material can be uploaded and freely licensed.

The new wizard is not yet the default option on Commons as it still has many problems with different types of browsers, but further improvements are planned to make this the default option in the future. Users are invited to try the new system and to report any problems they encounter.

Planning for MediaWiki 1.17

Many changes have been made to the MediaWiki software that runs Wikipedia since the (Northern) summer. However many of these changes have not yet been made available in the form of an official update to the software. The developers are now starting to plan for a new release of the software. A new 1.17 branch of the software is planned to be created this week. From that moment on, only the bigger bug fixes - and, importantly,

no new features

- will be allowed into that version of the software. There is still a lot of work to be done: all code that has not yet been reviewed will have to be reviewed by senior developers, for example, and a lot of testing will be required.

The hope is that in January a first test version of the software can be deployed on Wikipedia, though many important fixes are already live (draft roadmap).

In brief

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

• Kurt Luther (
  User:Superm401) and their team at Georgia Tech's Electronic Learning Communities Lab have released a new tool, called ProveIt, that allows Wikipedians to more easily add and manage references. The tool is available as a Wikipedia user script, User:ProveIt GT/ProveIt.js, and has been proposed as a gadget (Wiki-research-l). See also Signpost coverage
  of other reference-related tools
• A new feature on Wikimedia Commons has been released, trying to make sure that the proper language for an anonymous reader of Commons can be both selected and retained. Previously most readers were presented with the English interface, but now User:Multichill and User:mdale have developed a script that tries to rectify this problem more easily.
• Image galleries no longer default to four images per row, but will now have a fluid width, i.e., one in proportion to the width of the user's screen (bug #3276).
  
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