Talk:New Century Theatre

Similarity with web article

Thanks go to User:Scantasyundfiencefiction who asked a question at the Help desk about the similarity between this article and the web page at http://www.performingartsarchive.com/Theatres/Theatres-N/New-Century-Theatre_NYC/New-Century-Theatre_NYC.htm.

Moved from WP:Help desk § Possile copyright violation?

While writing the German article for New Century Theatre I stumbled upon this page [1] with exactly the same text. The creator of the wiki-article has been blocked for copyright infringement and the HTML of the webpage seems fairly old so I'm leaning towards the webpage beeing the original.

Since I don't know nothing about the workings of en.wp (and frankly don't have time to learn) I just leave this here in case it interests somebody. --Scantasyundfiencefiction (talk) 22:38, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Here's what I found:

Earwig gives 71% likely violation. Archive.org shows the oldest copy is from 6 August 2020; at that point, the article was at rev. 958244613 and looked substantially as it does now (that rev scores 73.9% at Earwig). But the Wikipedia article goes back to 2007, and we don't know about the web page, so did Archive.org miss earlier versions of it, or did the website simply copy from the Wikipedia article, which seems more likely, in which case it's not a violation? The page HTML has no internal indications about date; I'd say that the page html is simple and clean, which may indicate hand-coding, but not necessarily old. Seems more likely they copied from WP, but not sure how to be certain of this. Mathglot (talk) 01:16, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Moneytrees, Earwig's stats are merely similarity, correct? That is, it doesn't try to find dates and compare ages, does it? So, if it says "71% violation", it's not saying it's on the part of the WP editor, could just as well be the other way, right? Have I missed anything above, or how would you take this investigation further? OTOH, if "the creator of the wiki-article has been blocked for copyright infringement", do we take that into account in this case? (please  mention me on reply; thanks!) Mathglot (talk) 01:22, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

@Mathglot Hi, I saw this at the time but was on a road trip. Yes, the percentage is just the overlap, not the certainty. It doesn't calculate age/editor/etc in. I've come across this user before, so yes if the editor has been blocked for copyvio there is reason to be suspicious. In particular this user should probably be examined at CCI. The website itself dates back to 2007, around the time this article was created. Navigating the website at that time period, I can't find anything that suggests that they had profiles on theatres at the time, so I am assuming that they copied from us later, or it copied from another source that this article also copied from. I'm really not sure; it may be a good idea to list it at Copyright problems in the meantime. Moneytrees🏝️^{Talk/CCI guide} 23:43, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

 Done; see Wikipedia:Copyright problems/2022 January 31. Mathglot (talk) 01:10, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

@Moneytrees, I do recall seeing another theater article, which at first glance seemed to copy from performingartsarchive.com. It was http://www.performingartsarchive.com/Theatres/Theatres-M/Mark-Hellinger-Theatre_NYC/Mark-Hellinger-Theatre_NYC.htm, from Mark Hellinger Theatre. In that case, the performingartsarchive.com article actually copied from us, even attributing Wikipedia as the source. I'm not saying New Century wasn't a copyvio, but looking at similar pages like [2] (Broadhurst Theatre), [3] (Winter Garden Theatre), the content is formatted extremely closely to how these pages looked in 2007, without attribution. This does bring up the possibility that the site is extensively involved in reverse copyvio from us, not the other way around.

That said, the creator of this article was most likely involved in copyright infringement elsewhere; they were blocked for image copyvios. In other instances like Broadhurst Theatre (now rewritten by me), they added stuff in 2007 that was closely paraphrased from the contents of a book published in 2002 (the online source was the same as the print version). – Epicgenius (talk) 16:52, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

@Epicgenius Thanks for checking around the rest of the site, and rewriting the article. Yeah, Broadhurst Theatre was the other article from this user I was thinking about. I actually checked that book, but there's no substantial mentions of this theatre in it, so it's out of the question. I note that the editor did not cite the source he copied from in that edit, and cited no sources when creating this article. Given this and guidelines on removing content added by serial infringers, I've removed the content written by the editor. Moneytrees🏝️^{Talk/CCI guide} 20:36, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

No problem Moneytrees. The book in question actually only discusses active Broadway theaters (plus the Mark Hellinger Theatre and New York City Center), but neglects all other defunct theaters. Nonetheless it may be helpful to check whether this user has infringed from other sources about Broadway theaters, and I suspect they may have also infringed from sources that are only available as print versions. – Epicgenius (talk) 00:15, 1 February 2022 (UTC)