Wikipedia talk:Plagiarism of Wikipedia

About this page

I set up this guide page to centralize discussion on the particular challenge of addressing plagiarism of Wikipedia. Thanks to

• MartinHarper who in 2003 started Wikipedia:Copyright problems
• Thumperward who in 2008 started {{Backwards copy}}
• Bri who in 2018 started Plagiarism from Wikipedia
• PBS and fgnievinski who talked with me at Wikipedia_talk:Plagiarism#Plagiarism_of_Wikipedia

It is not fair or appropriate of me to thank only people who started guide pages or who answered my questions, but it is easy for me to see these names because Wikipedia's current interface makes these names easiest to see. I wish it were easier for me to thank everyone who has every developed this discussion. Lots of people have contributed to this issue over the years at these pages above and in other discussion forums. It would not have been useful for me to make this page without having so much past content and discussions to present as links and precedent. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this. Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:37, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

@Bluerasberry: thanks for starting this. I got here hoping to find a place to discuss Bing Maps' lack of a copyleft statement for their WP-derived snippets. So, there's no program to centrally report such things? Surprising that the WMF isn't on that. Technically this means I could demand action personally from Microsoft, I suppose, having written many geo articles for the Pacific Northwest. - Bri.public (talk) 16:52, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

@Bri.public: I think a personal demand should be part of it, but it would be better to log the violation publicly in wiki and make the demand as part of a public timestamped permanently archived media record. Creative Commons themselves also has no public support system for this and protecting the media. It is all an honor system, and if Microsoft or anyone else chooses to not comply, then there is no obvious communication path to raising the issue. Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:51, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

I'll think about how that would work for me. For reference, Bing Maps search for "Theatre Alley" [in Manhattan] returns an exact copy of my 2017 text, attribution is Data from: Wikipedia without any mention of my copyright. Oddly, a Bing internet search returns the same text but with Wikipedia · Text under CC-BY-SA license, so at least someone there is aware of the copyleft requirements. - Bri.public (talk) 19:10, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Confusing plagiarism and copyright

@User:Bluerasberry the first sentence of this essay states:

Plagiarism of Wikipedia is the taking of content from Wikipedia and republishing it without proper attribution and perhaps in violation of copyright or the terms of the Wikimedia platform's Creative Commons license. This internal working page compiles notes and reports on plagiarism of Wikipedia.

This is confusing plagarism with copyright violations. If an external source copies the structure or content of a Wikipedia article—that is not under copyright, because it is not creative enough—then if no acknowledgement is given and the author of the external source passes it off as the author's own work that is plagarism. Three examples:

1. Using the Table of Content (TOC) to structure an external article would either be a copyright violation or plagarism depending on how unique the wording in the TOC. Take for example, the article Bombing of Dresden, its structure is unique to Wikipedia (due to NPOV considerations) so to structure an external essay the same way would be obvious.
2. In the case of an Wikipedia biography, an external source might, write an article using words unique to that external source, but use the same quotations in the same order as found in the Wikipedia article (plagarism).
3. Lists are often considered not to have enough creativity to merit copyright under US law, so the content of List of Victoria Crosses by school or High Sheriff of Worcestershire which were compiled by Wikipedia editors using many sources, and may not availiable as such a list from other sources. So to use the content of such a list without acknowledging Wikipedia as a source may not be a copyright violation, but it is plagarism.

-- PBS (talk) 18:37, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

PBS Okay, everything you say seems fine. How would you reword things? Just be bold and do it - you seem to have good ideas. Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:44, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

Template Backwards Copy

• {{Backwards copy}}

If anyone wants to research plagiarism of Wikipedia with computer science and data visualization, following Template:Backwards copy is a great place to start for the human-identified cases. The present transclusion count is 1216, each one marking a case of plagiarism of Wikipedia. Hundreds of users have applied these tags and tens of thousands of readers have seen them. Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:40, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

The Category:Wikipedia article talk pages incorporating the backwardscopy template is primarily to make sure that Wikipedia editors do not accidentally mark Wikipedia pages as copyright violations. If the external page does not have appropriate licence attribution then that external page is usually a copyright violation it is not usually plagiarism. I think you need to clarify in your own mind the difference between the two. -- PBS (talk) 18:53, 21 December 2019 (UTC)