Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/University of California, Berkeley/Environmental Justice: Race, Class, Equity, and the Environment (Spring 2014)

Copyright Violation
Pinged users:, , , , , , , ,


 * Hello,
 * My name (here on WIkipedia) is . It has come to my attention that has written a draft in User:Cal Bare/sandbox which includes copyrighted materials from
 * http://www.nrdc.org/ej/history/hej4.asp
 * http://www.nrdc.org/health/effects/latino/english/execsum.asp
 * http://www.nrdc.org/health/effects/latino/english/latino_en.pdf
 * http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/elist/eListRead/environmental_justice_20_years_after_clintons_historic_executive_order/
 * etc.


 * Wikipedia can't have any copyrighted material (exceptions like fair use images exist) on its site, not even in sandboxes/drafts.


 * I might (as I sometimes are) be wrong, and I would be glad if you responded here regaring this issue.


 * (t) Josve05a  (c) 23:51, 7 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi - I'm taking a look asap and will take appropriate action.  Sorry for not responding earlier, I haven't been on Wikipedia in the last few hours.  I'll be reviewing user sandboxes and contribs extensively tomorrow as well.  Kevin Gorman (talk) 06:21, 8 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi - a turnitin scan confirmed that, yes, the student's sandbox contained extensive cut/paste material, from the sources you named and others.  I have blanked the sandbox and gotten in touch with the student - I will scan all of the classes contributions tomorrow. Thanks for alerting me to this before I caught it.  Best, Kevin Gorman (talk) 06:28, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

(To help you a bit, I have look a little myself too...) and from what I can see User:Bmqj/sandbox is (partly) copied from:
 * http://www.cbecal.org/organizing/northern-california/richmond/
 * http://www.cbecal.org/organizing/southern-california/710-freeway-freight-transport-campaign/
 * (amongst a few)

(t) Josve05a  (c) 10:26, 8 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Just as a note, I've both been dealing with an RL emergency for the last several days, and also had spotty internet access. Checking for copyright issues and other policy problems as well as general monitoring of student contributions is on my todo list for a good chunk of today. Kevin Gorman (talk) 20:55, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I hope the RL emergency has been resolved/will be resolved real soon and we all have bad internet access sometimes! (t) Josve05a  (c) 23:21, 11 April 2014 (UTC)


 * I've now gone through (with the aid of ithenticate) the sandbox of every student in the class; I believe I've dealt with every copyright violation present. Luckily there were few, and I'm pretty confident that most of them were misunderstandings rather than intentional plagiarism. We'll be contacting the involved students privately.  ( - sorry about the delayed revdels, but it was easier with ithenticate to just remove all the copyvios first and revdel them afterwards all at once.) Kevin Gorman (talk) 23:10, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Good! I can't wait too see the final products from these texts. (I just feel a little bad...I'm bringing up problems with students texts, and possible ruining their grades.) (t) Josve05a  (c) 23:21, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi - you shouldn't feel remotely bad about it - you just caught it before I did.  I was going to run every student's work through iThenticate at least twice before the end of the semester, so it would've been caught one way or another.   The behavior of the students involved moving forward will determine what effect stuff like this will have on their grades, as will the level of issue involved in the first place.  I'm glad that most of the issues that got picked up were relatively trivial and look likely to be innocuous mistakes, but am definitely disappointed at a couple of the issues I nuked.


 * A lot of the apparent tone issues I'll address working with students directly in the next couple weeks, and some of them weren't what they appeared to be anyway - we were using sandboxes as a staging point for a midway assignment, so not everything in them would be expected to be encyclopedic. Once everything is put together, I'm hoping the results will be quite encyclopedic and high quality :) Kevin Gorman (talk) 23:38, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

As User:Cal Bare/sandbox was listed at WP:CP and came due for admin closure today, I investigated to discover that the student had again placed copied content in that space. See. I didn't check other sources - that was enough for me to revert and warn. This content was added on April 9th, before you went through with iThenticate. It concerns me that iThenticate did not pick up this duplication, which I found really rather easily by spot-checking text via google. :/ --Moonriddengirl (talk) 12:09, 15 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Omg, seeing your name come up on a course page associated with me scared the bejesus out of me. The iThenticate issue is actually an easy one - I had started running scans immediately after Cal Bare's sandbox had been discovered, and then got distracted by real life.  When I returned to real life, in what was apparently a poor judgment on my part, I figured I didn't need to scan the sandboxes of people I'd already scanned within the last week, and picked up where I left off.  I'm going to take an unusual step here that I am sure some are going to view as a violation of WP:INVOLVED, but I think is a practical and worthwhile one (especially since I'm primarily involved in an administrative capacity with these students, even irl) and indef block the student until they have a sitdown with me and their GSI.  I'm pretty sure my contract doesn't allow me to go in to details, but I'd like to promise everyone here that these students are not going to be happy. We do not take plagiarism lightly. Kevin Gorman (talk) 18:22, 15 April 2014 (UTC)
 * No, no! Just business as usual. :) Thanks. It seems likely he just needs some coaching, and I'm relieved to hear that iThenticate didn't miss that one! --Moonriddengirl (talk) 22:52, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

Can I join in or be of help.
I am a regular editor here with particular interest in the hydraulic fracturing articles. As this is a very contentious topic there is always the risk that articles are taken over by anti or pro fracking protagonists and used as a mediuum for promoting their views.

I have been strongly resisting this, mainly by opposing anti-fracking propaganda in the Hydraulic fracturing and Radionuclides associated with hydraulic fracturing‎ but also by opposing a too promotional approach in Hydraulic fracturing in the United Kingdom‎. In some cases, it seems that editors are genuinely unaware of the appropriate encyclopedic style that should be used in Wikipedia and many seem to believe that the idea is to find any news or media statement which supports their opinion and add it to the article, the logic being that it has a source so it must be in here.

I would strongly recommend that all those proposing to edit WP make sure that they understand our fundamental purpose, which is to write an encyclopedia, not to hold a forum for debating a particular topic, or reveal the truth. Anyone who has not looked through a quality written encyclopedia should do so to get an idea of the writing style appropriate here. I also suggest that newcomers, who are very welcome, should have a look through What Wikipedia is not and the Manual of Style. Martin Hogbin (talk) 08:59, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi Martin - thanks for your offer, any help would be appreciated. All of our students should understand the fundamental purpose of Wikipedia; they've received at least several hours of instruction in both the technical and policy sides of Wikipedia (as well as a bit on Wikipedia's history.)  They've also had it stressed to them quite a bit that whenever possible high quality sources should be used - e.g., peer reviewed papers (preferably metareviews) - and that stuff like omgfrackingisevil.com isn't going to cut it sourcing wise.  I've been internetless and dealing with an emergency for the last couple days so I haven't had time to review students' work in real time as I intended to, but will be catching up as quickly as I can.  Please flag any particular problems you notice so that I can speak to the relevant students individually, or just approach them on their talk page/the article talk page/etc.  Thanks again, Kevin Gorman (talk) 20:54, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I will comment on any editing that I consider enencyclopedic. Martin Hogbin (talk) 10:18, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

Article banners and some other issues
I noticed that although it is especially said at the course's page, most of students of this course do not use the course assignment banner or any other kind of notification about the course at the edited article's talk page. It took me quite a lot of time to figure out what is going on when a number of newly created accounts started to edit particular articles. It looked like a action of SPAs. For avoiding confusion and to create a transparency, please mark with the special banner all articles you are editing related to this course.

I am also not sure if all participants of this course have listed them at the course's page. Some of editors (SPAs) started to edit same articles at the same time but they are not listed here. It may be coincident, of course, but for some reasons it is hard to believe this.

I would like strongly to echo what was said by user:Martin Hogbin. It seems that most of participants of this article are aware of core policies such as WP:V and WP:RS. However, there seems to be a problem with an encyclopaedic style and some contributions are written more like essay than encyclopaedia. Also, being aware of WP:MOS, WP:NOT, WP:DUE and WP:SS would be useful. Shortly, that means that not everything mentioning the topic of article should go into the article, even if it corresponds to WP:V and WP:RS. That means, if we have the umbrella article Hydraulic fracturing, there are bits of information which belong into the more specific article, e.g. US-specific information should go into Hydraulic fracturing in the United States and Environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing in the United States, environmental issues, while summarized in the main article by using summary style, should be discussed in more detailed way in Environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing (US environmental related issues at Environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing in the United States) etc. What comcerns copyright issues and close paraphrasing, it was already discussed above.

My recommendation is that while editing controversial or potentially controversial topics it would be helpful to discuss your edits at the talk page before making them. Same applies also to technical problems. Recently there has been issues with incorrectly formatted references, which messed up some articles. Beagel (talk) 16:58, 30 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi - do you happen to remember any of the usernames of people who showed up at the same time but weren't listed as being enrolled in the course? I can crosscheck to make sure everyone got in.  I'll look around later myself for stragglers who didn't, but have a fairly busy week this week, so any direct pointers to people would be appreciated. Students, especially those editing likely to be controversial areas, should both be aware of talk pages and received fairly individualized guidance about what pages would be appropriate to target.  Essay vs encyclopedic style is something that students have both had explained multiple times to them, and have received individualized guidance and grading on a couple previous assignments about.  I'll be spending a good chunk of the next week flagging down students with persistent issues re: essayness.  I didn't go in to great detail about the MOS with most students, because I don't think great detail is necessary to edit most articles or worth the time investment with limited time with students (I'm sysopped and I still miss plenty of MOS stuff.)  If you have specific MOS issues you think are significant, I'll flag them and incorporate them in to future trainings, but in general, I think our full set of MOS pages is about fifty times longer than it should be heh.


 * References were when area where I definitely spent insufficient time with students, I've been addressing it as I can, and I'll be approaching training students re: references differently in future courses. It's something I definitely messed up this go-about.  I'll probably AWB a list of talkpages and tag them later, but if you didn't know, course enrollment is also listed at the top of each person's contribution history, so for those who are enrolled, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out it's part of a course project even if talk page tagging is missed. I haven't run a full copyright/paraphrase scan in about a week, but all previous issues have been directly addressed and shouldn't recur.  I assume I can't go in to details of what I mean by that because of university policy, though no one ever bothered to tell me university policy, heh.


 * Once the semester wraps up, I'll be going through each set of contributions individually, addressing any situations where contributions represented a net negative myself. It may be worth keeping in mind that in most college classes, some number of students bluntly don't do awesomely, so regardless of how training went/was structured, there will be some clean-up associated with every class project (but, again, I'm hoping to handle most of it personally.)  Feel free to ping me here or on my talk page about any particular issues of concern, or via email if it's something sensitive.  Kevin Gorman (talk) 17:31, 30 April 2014 (UTC)


 * I have two such names which may be related to this course: and . Also  made their two edits approximately at the same time but they seem to be unrelated. The particular issue at the moment is that students forgot to add the course assignment banner at the talk pages as recommended. This may create a confusion. Beagel (talk) 18:05, 30 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Oddly enough, none of those three appear to be ours. I'll fix the banner issue at some point today/tomorrow (unfortunately, I have bad timing and pretty severe chemical burns this week, when students will be starting to edit live space more eagerly.)  I'd encourage you to treat students here as you would any other new editor, but would ask you to drop me a note if someone ends up reverting you without engaging on talk or in some ther way so I can deal with it on my end. Best, Kevin Gorman (talk) 18:27, 30 April 2014 (UTC)