User talk:Kjkolb/Copyvio

Information here on copyvio is quite useful. I especially agree with points 2, 3, 7, 8, and the part about the anonymous users on 9. I've also seen vandalism and self promotion from anonymous sources. As to point 6, I would agree with the promotional part but I have several friends that have written for Wikipedia that are writers by profession, and they always seem professional in their contributions; which brings me to point 1. These same people will develop an entire article in an offline editor and post it in one edit. In truth, if you don't make a rather large edit on your first try, there are admins out there that will be running over each other to be the first on the scene for a speedy deletion. Point 4 I might not have a proper understanding on, because I would think this is more of a problem of not previewing edits and leaving in typographical errors. I have to say I don't much agree with point 5 though. New guys will commit all of these errors and some people are either bad writers or don't pay close enough attention to things like redlinks, redundants, or unwikified sections. Perhaps a clarification here as to what sorts of things might be redlinked that might never lead to articles would be helpful. Redlinks though are purposely used by some writers as an indication that a supporting article needs to be written. You probably have a good idea what you mean on these points that I've been critical of, and its just me that's not getting it completely. I might suggest on 1 and 6, however, something like "This criteria might not apply to very experienced contributors." I like that on point 9 you added "these users are rarely adding the content maliciously." Sometimes readers will take lists like yours here, interpret it far to literally, and procede to meaness to new guys. Hope you don't mind the list repost here, but I didn't want to have to bounce back and forth too much if there was any subsequent discussion. And again; I found the article to be useful. Thanks for writing it. Aspenocean 17:40, 5 May 2007 (UTC)


 * 1. It is a very long article made in a single edit.
 * 2. It has formatting that Wikipedia does not support (you'll see symbols or code).
 * 3. It has indented paragraphs, more than one blank line between paragraphs or long sections of text without paragraphs.
 * 4. There are no spaces between brackets and text.
 * 5. It is almost entirely unwikified or is wikified in an inappropriate manner (redundant linking, large numbers of redlinks or linking words unlikely to ever have articles).
 * 6. The article is extremely promotional, appears to be professionally written, or the writing style has characteristics of a newspaper or magazine article.
 * 7. It has a big reference list for an article of its size, especially if most of the references are offline. These are often research papers or peer-reviewed articles that were posted online.
 * 8. It looks like it was copied and pasted from somewhere. Some formatting is unlikely to happen if the user had typed it in. For example, the text may start a new line in the middle of sentences.
 * 9. The content was added by an anonymous user or a registered user with no user page. These users often make excellent contributions, and almost everyone was anonymous and/or a "redlink" at one time, but a higher percentage of such edits are copyright violations. Also, these users are rarely adding the content maliciously, they just are not aware of copyright law.