User:S Marshall/Essay

Wikipedia has policies about verifiability and copyright, with a guideline about plagiarism and an explanatory supplement about close paraphrasing. This essay is about how all of those rules interact, and how to apply them in the context of an ongoing content dispute.

One Wikipedia's most important principles is verifiability: the idea that everything we publish, must first have been published by a reliable source. Good editors are rightly passionate about verifiability. But there is confusion about how to apply it. For example, User:Rlevse, prolific content-writer, sysop, checkuser, bureaucrat, and arbitrator, after learning that there are rules against plagiarism and copyright violations and he'd been breaking them for several years, said:"Wiki is horrible at educating editors. It has always expected people to know all the rules and to keep up with all the changes. This is impossible, even for dedicated long-tenured users. Given this and the way it's headed with the rules and all, many have and will stop producing content.As I've said, if you don't source well, you get OR and cite needed tags, but if you source too closely, you get what happened to me. I never intended to do anything wrong. I had everything reffed; to the point that I had so many sources people told me remove some. To me that's attribution, but I guess to some it isn't. This isn't an excuse, I accept what I did, I goofed.My goof was in not knowing where the swinging pendulum of "ref everything well but don't copy" pendulum was at. I've seen some other editors also mention this and how hard it is.I grew up on wiki with "everything is okay as long as you have a valid RS for it" training--because if you don't you get cite needed tags. I never knew the pendulum was swinging back further away from that, more to the "don't closely paraphrase" school.So I goofed here but my heart is with the project. However, wiki is its own worst enemy, it allows anyone to edit and has poor ineffective mechanisms for dealing with problem editors--this particular problem is essentially unsolvable. Shoot, I asked many people for help because I know I’m not good at writing, so why didn't Grace Sherwood get more closely checked until after it was on the Main Page? This points up the systemic problems so many have discussed.I'm deeply sorry I've brought these problems to wiki and ArbCom. As stupid as it may sound, I thought I was in full compliance with policies. I know many will never believe that, but it's true, so you can call me stupid, but not legitimately claim I had ill intent of any sort.I'm glad to have known many fine editors and upstanding people that I’ve encountered during my wiki career. Too bad my 5 years have now been overshadowed by this."

- Rlevse

Verifiability is not negotiable. Our articles must mean what the sources mean. But if we say what the sources say in the words the sources use, then we're not writing an encyclopaedia. We're stealing one.

So we must say what the sources say, but we must use our own words to say it.

Quotations
Where we do use a source's exact words, we should do so in the form of a quotation. This is set out Quotations "In some instances, quotations are preferred to text. For example, when dealing with a controversial subject. As per the WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV policy, biased statements of opinion can only be presented with attribution. Quotations are the simplest form of attribution. Editors of controversial subject should quote the actual spoken or written words to refer to the most controversial ideas. Controversial ideas must never appear to be from Wikipedia.""

Public domain text
You can copy/paste from text that's in the public domain, but WP:PLAG still applies when you do, so it's still best practice to use all three of the following:- quotation formatting, in-text attribution, and inline citations.

Conclusions
It necessarily follows from this that verifiability applies at the level of thoughts, concepts and ideas. It is not to be applied on the level of individual words or phrases.