Wikipedia:Copyright problems/2015 December 7

Copyright investigations (manual article tagging)

 * Red Bull Culture Clash ([ history] · [ last edit] · rewrite) from http://www.factmag.com/2012/11/08/red-bull-music-academy-culture-clash-2012-who-won-and-how-it-happened/. Crookesmoor (talk) 09:06, 7 December 2015 (UTC)


 * Pictogram voting keep.svg Article cleaned by investigator or others. No remaining infringement. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 17:46, 3 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Ashraf Ghani as http://president.gov.af/en/page/8262/8263 Help wanted, please - I don't know what action's needed, if any.
 * A substantial amount of text was added in 2006. Parts were recently deleted and reinstated. I then deleted parts as copyright violations because identical or extremely closely matching text was to be found in various places including the subject's own official biography as president of Afghanistan. I hadn't yet noticed the text was added to Wikipedia eight years before Ashraf Ghani became president.


 * In 2006, raised concerns about that text on the article talk page and on the contributing editor's talk page. The editor,, didn't reply or edit again so the questions of copyright and conflict of interest remain outstanding.


 * When I realised that the 2006 text couldn't have been copied from the presidential biography, I considered self-reverting. But while it's possible - if very surprising - that the presidential biog was copied from Wikipedia, it's also possible that both spring from some other text that predates both, might have been written by Lockhart and/or might even have been partly written by Ashraf Ghani himself, e.g. in a book or a list of conference speakers.


 * If it was a copyright violation, then there's still some very close paraphrasing that should probably be removed. NebY (talk) 14:27, 7 December 2015 (UTC)
 * I apologize tremendously for the great delay here, NebY. We've got a massive backlog. I think that was a good catch, and it may never be possible to determine whether that text was published elsewhere first or here first, because what we have there is a case of COI. Note the name of the editor who added the bulk of that text. Then see this telling bit of text which was removed. (I checked that editorial to see if the text was from there; it's not.) What I like to do is look for the first substantive changes to text (which we see here) and then do a google search for the older text. That can help eliminate content that was copied from Wikipedia and find the older material. In that case, I found this, but can't date it.  All I know is that it was in 2006. It's a small amount of text.


 * I think the odds are good that his collaborator wrote this text, either on his behest or on her own impulse. That it has subsequently been embraced as official is undoubtable, but I wouldn't work to remove further close paraphrasing given the lack of any predating text. I wouldn't restore it, either. While I think that the odds are quite high that the author placed it here herself and thus was quite able to license it, I can't prove it. I think your actions there were the right ones. The safest thing to do is to rewrite the most egregious content.


 * I'm going to archive today's listing without further action, but if you want to talk further about it, please feel free to drop by my talk page. I'm shamefully slow in responding these days, but I will get around to it! --Moonriddengirl (talk) 10:09, 9 May 2016 (UTC)