Talk:Conrad Hubert/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: David Eppstein (talk · contribs) 05:52, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

The recent expansion in Special:Diff/1103747865 has what is now a familiar pattern of very lightly paraphrased plagiarism. Example:


 * From the expansion: ... got a job with Joshua Lionel Cowen, creator of Lionel toy trains. Cowen had at this time just developed what he called an "electric flowerpot." It was a slender battery inside a paper tube with a small light bulb at the end. The battery tube was stood up in the center of a flower pot with the bulb on top that lite up an artificial plant. Hubert saw a potential commercial market for this lighted flowerpot. He convinced ...
 * From the source: ... took a job with Joshua Lionel Cowen, the man who would one day create Lionel trains. Cowen had just perfected what he called the "electric flowerpot." It consisted of a slender battery in a tube with a light bulb at one end. The tube rose up through the center of a flower pot to light up an artificial plant. Hubert believed in the commercial potential of the electric flowerpot and convinced ...

This is totally unacceptable. This is not Good Article writing. This is straight-up copying someone else's writing (a 2007 book), in violation of copyright, and making small changes that made the prose worse in hope that they would make it harder for you to get caught. You have been the subject of a Contributor copyright investigation since March 2021, and have been told repeatedly on many occasions that this level of copying is wrong, and yet this happened on August 10, 2022, the day this was nominated for GA.

Quick fail. Not acceptable for GA until a ground-up rewrite of the whole article has removed all material copied or lightly paraphrased from sources and rewritten it with a fresh organization of material in fresh prose rather than warmed-over regurgitation of someone else's prose in the same ordering of the same ideas. Not just this one paragraph that I'm pointing to here. Rewriting just this paragraph would still mean copying its sequence of ideas, and if such blatant copying is present here in the first thing that I checked then I strongly suspect more is present throughout. The whole article needs to be rewritten. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:52, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

To the admin
Please do not delete this per G8. Useful to Wikipedia, and this was undeleted per user request. Jay 💬 18:59, 7 April 2024 (UTC)