User talk:Al fasi

A page you started (Samuel Romanelli) has been reviewed!
Thanks for creating Samuel Romanelli, Al fasi!

Wikipedia editor Blythwood just reviewed your page, and wrote this note for you:

"Looks good. I've added some source links and categories, also tweaked the intro. Hope it all looks OK."

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Blythwood (talk) 20:34, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Samuel Romanelli article
I've just had another look at the Samuel Romanelli article, and I see that you copied the entire text from the Jewish Encyclopedia. I think this has problems - according to the text it was written in 1906, so even if it's out of copyright, saying that works may be "still in manuscript" and things like that aren't a good thing to add since they might be out of date, and more recent scholarship might have overtaken it. It's better to cite a period source than copy its text over completely, I think. Blythwood (talk) 07:01, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
 * 1)I'm glad that someone is interested in increasing the quality of the entry. 2) I accept that there is an overall value of having original articles, which I regret that I do not currently have time to write. 3) How can we label this discussion with the heading "copyright issue" if it is clearly out of copyright? 4) One of the sources that you cited in the footnotes you added yourself states that many of his works are still in manuscript as of the publication year of 1989. 5) In my years looking at Wikipedia articles on less well-known figures in Jewish history I can assure you that there are dozens of pages copied in a large part or in full from the Encyclopedia Judaica.  The creators of these pages probably thought, as I do, that it's better to have an outdated Wikipedia entry than no Wikipedia entry, particularly given the vast number of people who would search for such a figure on Wikipedia but have never heard of the Encyclopedia Judaica.Al fasi (talk) 07:17, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Sorry yes, put that heading title in by mistake. My concern is just that 1) just copying text without credit can make us look kind of bad 2) it implies that the text is up to date with modern scholarship when it might not be. But there is a simple solution - you can actually tag an article to warn people if you used the encyclopedia's text by putting in a code snippet - Joseph ben Baruch is an example of this, if you look at the bottom it has a tag citing the source. Blythwood (talk) 07:29, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I am an inexperienced editor who did not know that there was a culture of citation from public domain articles or a consequence for "looking bad" in this fashion. I have happily added the "source" link as suggested.  As long as we are keeping intellectual transparency up to snuff: there is further language that I did not add explaining that it "incorporates text" from EJ. To my mind it does more than "incorporating" text, but is identical to it except for your edits.  Hence my personal preference, absent any knowledge of Wikipedia editing culture and the extent to which I am beholden to this conversation, would be to remove the code that produced this message now that I have added the source link as suggested.
 * Oh and I have just noticed that you removed an entire paragraph for reasons that I do not understand. Really this is too much - in the time we've spent tweaking an article to death over these details we could have written a new one ourselves.  Must we wrangle over every word or will you allow a substantial amount of information that you removed to go back as it was published 111 years ago?  I might have less of a case on that score if you had replaced it with a similar amount of text or information.  Do you have any knowledge of Romanelli, or is this some point of principle about the purity of Wikipedia articles?  You have reduced an informative if outdated section of 230 words to a mere 100, a 57% reduction that includes several things that are as true today as in 1906.
 * You have to give attribution so that our readers are made aware that you copied the prose rather than wrote it yourself. I've added the attribution for this particular instance. Please make sure that you follow this legal requirement when copying from compatibly-licensed material in the future. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 12:23, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Will happily do so; I have no need for it to appear that I personally wrote the article. You can see that before you intervened, I had already included a different link indicating where the article came from, at Blythwood's suggestion. My objection in this thread is only to the idea that another user would delete half of a now-properly-sourced article, particularly when one of the only specific criticisms of why it might sound outdated was explicitly validated in one of the sources that that user themselves added to the article!Al fasi (talk) 15:16, 24 October 2017 (UTC)