Wikipedia talk:Contributor copyright investigations/Instructions

I'll start the conversation since you don't seem inclined to. It asks for a cursory check to confirm that the problems which have been pointed out are not the extent of the problem. It could take 10 seconds to notice their most recent edit was to copy a source verbatim into an article. On the other hand it could take half an hour to track down an offline source and see that it's been used in other articles in the editor's area(s) of interest. The point is the result (confirm that the problem does extend past a small handful of articles), not the amount of time or effort that checking it takes. Does that make sense? Do you think there's a better word or words which would suit the instructions?

On the topic of "clarify" tags, Am I correct in assuming that "good time" is the phrase you think needs clarification at the bottom of this page? VernoWhitney (talk) 00:02, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Okay, I guess I'll just have a one-sided conversation here. What constitutes a "good time" depends entirely on the CCI and varies incredibly wildly--even in best-case scenarios. One which has 100 articles and/or where the copying is verbatim and/or recent and/or the sources are attributed and/or are online and/or is in the area of an active WikiProject willing and able to help with cleanup is much different than one which 10,000 articles and/or where the problem is too-close paraphrases and/or from years ago and/or the sources are not attributed and/or are offline and/or with no ready group of other editors who don't normally work copyvio willing and able to cleanup. VernoWhitney (talk) 01:41, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
 * ok, it depends, no one word will do. Here from context we are concerned with giving an instruction to clerks and requesters on when to seek help (secondarily, the subjects of CCI request will be looking to see how long this might take). Let's start with a generous upper bound. Also in your post I hear your concern for the manpower issue and I would like to dialog with you on that later. Hugh (talk) 02:01, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
 * "confirm that the problem does extend past a small handful of articles" ok, let's try and clarify how far passed a handful instead of time, thanks Hugh (talk) 01:52, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
 * One obvious problem that is not mentioned in the nomination statement is sufficient (more if not). MER-C 03:35, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

"Presumptive deletion" of User:Bwmoll3 pages
Per this discussion:, I believe that the ongoing wholesale deletion by User:Buckshot06 of pages that User:Bwmoll3 created or substantially contributed to is not in accordance with CCI policy: As I said in the discussion, given the vast size of the Bwmoll3 CCI and the intervening edits on many of those pages, there is considerable collateral damage caused by their deletion and so there should be a more transparent and orderly process of tagging problematic pages so that interested editors can rewrite/source them rather than pages randomly disappearing. I believe that this is the intention of Copyright violations: ''If you suspect a copyright violation but are uncertain if the content is copyrighted or whether the external site is copying from Wikipedia, you should at least bring up the issue on that page's discussion page, if it is active. In that case, please tag the page "copypaste|url=insert URL here, if known", unless your concerns are swiftly resolved.'' Rather than presumptively deleting pages, they should be tagged and only if not improved within a certain time, deleted. Until this issue is clarified there is no point in any User working on any of these 5000+ pages in case their work may be "presumptively deleted". I would note that in some instances when Users have raised issues regarding "presumptive deletion" with Buckshot06, such as here: User talk:Buckshot06/Archive 24 he seems to have no issue with reinstating the "parts without problems", so why is the initial instinct to delete the entire page when the "problematic" parts can clearly be easily identified and removed? Mztourist (talk) 04:23, 5 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Contributor copyright investigations states that: If contributors have been proven to have a history of extensive copyright violation, it may be assumed without further evidence that all of their major contributions are copyright violations, and thus removed indiscriminately, in accordance with Copyright violations. If such indiscriminate removal would be controversial or cause considerable collateral damage, an effort must be made to assemble a volunteer force sufficient to evaluate problematic contributions. If insufficient volunteers are available to manage clean-up, presumptive wholesale removal is allowed. I am not aware of any effort having been made to assemble a volunteer force sufficient to evaluate problematic contributions in this case
 * Contributor copyright investigations/20130819 states that to avoid collateral damage, efforts should be made when possible to verify infringement before removal. It is unclear that infringement has been verified and in at least some cases the sources used by Bwmoll3 are in the public domain and for that reason are not copyright violations
 * At my talkpage, I have urged Mztourist to move this discussion to a much higher visibility talkpage; Milhist was the venue in the past (Archive 145). However, I believe current and continuing actions are well covered/summarised by one of the sections Mztourist has quoted above - If insufficient volunteers are available to manage clean-up, presumptive wholesale removal is allowed. Buckshot06 (talk) 06:30, 5 May 2019 (UTC)
 * On his Talk page Buckshot06 subsequently said that "The page you've raised it at is a good place for CCI discussion." Mztourist (talk) 08:55, 6 May 2019 (UTC)
 * My concerns over this is that article history is being lost. This impacts on Wikipedia copyright attribution, especially where other editors have edited articles in good faith. I believe that this in itself is a copyright violation. For example, I have edited the RAF Headcorn article, but you wouldn't know it looking at the article history (since corrected). Is there some other way that this can be handled, such as selective suppression, whilst leaving article history intact? Mjroots (talk) 07:28, 6 May 2019 (UTC)
 * It's difficult, I suspect, because a lot of the problem articles are ones that were created by Bwmoll3, so copyvio is likely to have been there from the start - this makes it harder to clean out the article. What would be helpful is a list of what articles have been presumptively deleted (and warnings if articles are about to be deleted) is posted to interested projects such as WP:MILHIST - this will encourage re-creation of lost articles and may allow articles at risk to be saved by reducing to stubs.Nigel Ish (talk) 19:17, 6 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Nigel Ish, I agree and it seems that pages "presumptively deleted" can be readily reinstated with offending content removed, so why is wholesale deletion even necessary? Mztourist (talk) 04:08, 7 May 2019 (UTC)


 * A modest proposal
 * Bwmoll3, in my experience, always included an infobox. Information in infoboxes is presumably factual, and should not arranged in a manner that infringes on copyrighted material.  Rather than deleting entire pages presumptively, why not strip them to the infoboxes? Another way to avoid deleting entire pages on former military installations would be to make them redirects to their current civilian installation, rather than blanking them.  --Lineagegeek (talk) 23:22, 9 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Lineagegeek, obviously Infoboxes should never be deleted, but I believe that we can comply with copyright and WP CCI policy to save more pages from the collateral damage of "presumptive deletion". Presumptive deletion removes all page history so we can't even see what Bwmoll3 originally wrote/copied to check if it was actually a breach of copyright at the time or if subsequent revisions made it not a breach. The only person who gets to consider that is the last person who views the page before it is "presumptively deleted". Anyone wishing to recreate the page has to start from scratch, locating RS which were presumably on the deleted page. Mztourist (talk) 05:56, 11 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Just the point. Presumptively deleting content, rather than presumptively deleting articles retains the history (and redirects).  However he may have used them, Bwmoll3 also usually listed references, so one of his articles could be cleansed of presumptive copyvios by removing material other than these two sections, leaving the article a stub, but leaving it. --Lineagegeek (talk) 14:43, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

Conflicting advice?
Please see WT:Contributor_copyright_investigations for a query about apparent conflicting advice in CCI instructions. Nick Moyes (talk) 21:32, 2 September 2021 (UTC)