Talk:Thomas Arbuthnot

Copyright violation from DNB
I checked the validity of the DNB reference which was added yesterday, and found that the text of the article was a very lightly rewritten version of the text of the article in the Dictionary of National Biography, at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/613 (note that to access it, you need to be a subscriber or to have access through an institution such as a public library).

I have therefore removed all substantive text from the article, leaving it with only an infobox and categories, tagged it with copyvio, and listed it at Copyright_problems.

It does appear from the article's history that there are some earlier stubby versions which are not merely light edits of the DNB text, and it may' be possible to revert to one of those versions, if they are sufficiently substantive to be worth retaining.

The copyvio material appears to have been added in this edit on 18 May by User:Frendraught, so it might be OK to revert to the previous version by User:Kittybrewster.

However, it might be better to delete this article and start again, so I leave it for discussion here to determine what course of action would be best. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 08:11, 31 May 2007 (UTC)


 * "the text of the article was a very lightly rewritten version of the text of the article in the Dictionary of National Biography, at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/613" – That's right. The new ODNB uses the same public domain source, the old DNB. As I stated here, the original autor is A. J. Arbuthnot, date of the original publication is 1885. Alexander John Arbuthnot died in 1907, so everything he wrote is in the public domain now. You can see the same phenomenon in the EB. They too – making their lives easier – use their old, public domain material from the 1911 EB, sometimes slightly rewritten, sometimes not. Greetings, --Frendraught 09:54, 13 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Frendraught, thanks for that info. I'm removing the copyvio tag based on your information. In such cases, it is especially important to note the source you're taking the text from, not just listing it in references. Talk page is good for giving such details, which are unimportant except when tracing copyvio allegiations. --Alvestrand 22:38, 14 June 2007 (UTC)