Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-10-30/Plagiarism cleanup

Conflation of plagiarism and copyright violation

This article isn't guily of it, but it's worth pointing out that Wikipedia discussions very often reveal a lazy and infuriating conflation of plagiarism and copyright violation. A commonly-expressed sentiment amongst Wikipedians seems to be that if something is in public domain it can be lifted wholesale without any citing of the source. There is still a large amount of totally unreferenced detritus from the CIA World Factbook knocking about in the country articles, to give one notorious example. Plagiarism is a much bigger problem at Wikipedia than copyright violation, of which there is at least a decent level of awareness in the community. Many of Wikipedia's editors would be thrown out of universities if they tried to hand in some of the stuff you can find on here. 89.240.193.45 18:58, 10 December 2006 (UTC)