Wikipedia talk:Contributor copyright investigations/20111004

Getting to the harder stuff
It's easy when the entry is short, or clumsily worded. Those are unlikely to be copyvios. More than once however I've started to review a page with extensive new material that sounds suspiciously professional and had no idea how to confirm that the material was, or wasn't, lifted from another source. I wonder if we are approaching the point at which substantial contributions should simply be presumed to be copyvios and rewritten to remove overlap with any pre-existing source. Thoughts? JohnInDC (talk) 18:12, 19 October 2011 (UTC)
 * As he has claimed to be an aviation historian, I'm not sure we can assume that. Of course, given the number of typos when he does write from scratch, I'm not sure we can't assume that either. -- SarekOfVulcan (talk) 18:16, 19 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Interesting question: given that he is a published author on aviation history...are his books now to be considered non-RSes due to potential copyvio in them? - The Bushranger One ping only 19:20, 19 October 2011 (UTC)
 * The problem as I see it is that Ken appears quite commonly to have lifted stuff straight out of other sources, jiggling words or sentences around a bit, and then inserting it into articles. This behavior wasn't isolated, and indeed takes in the very subject areas in which he claims personal expertise (all those Yak articles for example).  I don't think everything he did was copied, necessarily; but conversely I don't think that any of his more significant edits are entitled to any presumption of originality.  Given the history here and the distinct possibility that anything he added might have been copied from another source, we have only two ways to know whether a particular contribution is, or is not, a copyright violation:  We know it is when someone finds the original source text.  We know it isn't only when we have reviewed the universe of potential original sources and found no correspondence.  That is quite time-consuming, never really quite comprehensive, and presents the additional problem of leaving (potential) copyvios in place.  Wouldn't it be easier just to revise the material with new phrasing and eliminate the possibility of continuing copyvio?  JohnInDC (talk) 19:38, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Revdel
Should significant-copyright-but-now-redirect pages, like Yak-14, have the copyright-infringing diffs revdel'd? - The Bushranger One ping only 23:15, 16 December 2011 (UTC)