Talk:Tennessee–Bulgaria National Guard Partnership

Difficult to repair
This one is nearly all plagiarism. If you take it out, there is little left. None of the sources work, but the material did not come from them. It came from a file you can't get now, except someone has it as a bootleg on their site. It isn't clear if the file came from the DoD or is a spin-off of Wikipedia. In any case the file covers only up to 2012 and is mainly 2012, so everything needs to be updated. I'm going to plug along doing the best I can with it until I reach the point where I can abandon it with template messages. I thought I just go through these military articles making small improvements but that is not the case.Botteville (talk) 21:34, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Plagiarized paragraphs
"Tennessee and Bulgaria were paired because they share similar geographical and cultural features. During the years since 1993, they have exchanged hundreds of soldiers on travelling contact teams and familiarization visits. Tennessee soldiers have also participated in major military exercises in Bulgaria sponsored by the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army in Europe, such as Cornerstone, Bulwark; etc. Many Bulgarian villages have been influenced in a positive way through Humanitarian Assistance initiatives in conjunction with Mil-to-Mil interaction.

Joint Contact teams continue to mature after Bulgaria’s accession into NATO in 2004, EUCOM, Tennessee, and Bulgaria wanted to explore moving to the next step of complexity in engagement activities with respect to the State Partnership Program. The events that EUCOM proposed were to be the first time Tennessee National Guard units were to conduct their annual training in Bulgaria independent of a larger exercise. Several major SPP events need to be highlighted which have impacted either side in a significant way. Vigilant Sentry is an exercise which combined efforts of both the 118th TN Medical group, and the 168th Military Police Battalion. The Medical part objectives’ were to provide medical, dental and pediatric care to the rural population in a joint effort with the Bulgarian Ministry of Defense and through the Military Academy and in cooperation with the Military of Health. Sentry Lion is another interesting event which took place in 2006 at the third Bulgarian AF base at Graf Ignatievo. In this event the TN Air Guard provided C-5 Cargo Transports to move the logistical equipment and support personnel from Oregon to Bulgaria."

These came from [source]. I don't know what to do with them. There is too much to be quoted in a footnote, and it really is too long to go in a quoted section. It is government so there is probably no copyright issue. I suppose we could could put in one of those notifications that says this material was taken from .... Let me see what I can find. Otherwise there would seem to be, as I said above, a problem with an article that is created by plagiarizing one source. This is the source.Botteville (talk) 13:11, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

results of lookup
First of all I must say I am not a lawyer nor do I have any special knowledge of copyright law. I'm just an ordinary Wikipedian. Therefore, everything I say should be checked by a lawyer or the equivalent.

There are some relevant articles on WP, most relevant Copyright status of work by the U.S. government. As far as I can see the source in question is an official work of the US government as government; that is, Headquarters EUCOM. There is no copyright on it or a special author such as a contractor. It appears to have been prepared by headquarters staff. This is basically a report. Therefore, it is in the public domain and does not need a copyright. In fact there is a whole series of articles here based on this one report. If you look at it you can easily see what they are.Botteville (talk) 23:37, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Finished my lookup. As it turns out, I'm a step or two behind. This source is actually contained as a pdf file under a commons category, State Partnership Program. That makes the licensing real simple: there are no restrictions. As far as I can see, no attribution of any sort is required for anything in it. I'm not quite sure of that latter. Our WP articles are what is called a remix. So technically speaking it would be fine just to put the material back, don't even need quotes. I don't agree with that ethically and in fact that is not what WP is doing. There are quite a few templates warning the reader that the article contains material from this or that source, such as Britannica 1911. Some licenses require attribution, but our public domain source apparently does not. I think, however, it is in the general spirit to put it in, also just in case.

So, here is what I want to do and will do barring further advisement. I looked through the templates and concocted this, rather than creating another template:

Just because the government article is in there does not mean we would want to use it as such. For one thing, it is only one source. For another, it is out of date. Thirdly, it is not written WP style; it sells the SPP. So, I want to restore the paragraphs above, put the attribution in, and then proceed to bring it up to standard. That is the method I would like to use on all the other SPP articles that are like this. Many are just stubs. The result will be a remix containing much but not all of the original government writing, to which the reader will be clued by the attribution.Botteville (talk) 01:24, 11 October 2017 (UTC)