Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-01-31/Opinion

Damnit, now I need spaghetti Bolognese. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 15:38, 31 January 2024 (UTC).


 * That was the plan all along... : D But seriously, thank you for the feedback, I appreciate it! Oltrepier (talk) 19:26, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

I'm reminded of the time -- many years ago -- where I typed in Google a very distinctive sentence from material I added to the article Lake Tana. (IMHO it was distinctive because it was an awkward & clumsy sentence.) And I found that what I wrote about the largest lake in Ethiopia had been copied in the webpages of a couple dozen travel agencies headquartered in Ethiopia. I contemplated alerting someone to this, but let it go: so much has been stolen from various Third World countries that I could tolerate a little plagiarism. Especially as it was not my best writing. -- llywrch (talk) 23:39, 31 January 2024 (UTC)
 * I think we might assume good faith about that, too... : D Oltrepier (talk) 21:43, 2 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Heh. I remember one of the websites that used that sentence even commented on the oddity or awkwardness of the sentence. So I'm convinced that they copied the Wikipedia article. But as I wrote above, I really don't care that it happened. (On the other hand I've found a number of NGOs working in Ethiopia copy paragraphs from Wikipedia into their reports without attribution, so that might be worth pursuing for plagiarism.) -- llywrch (talk) 23:59, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

It’s all too common. There’s a fair chunk of The Tottenham Outrage and Walthamstow Tram Chase: The Most Spectacular Hot Pursuit in History that was directly lifted from the text I wrote for Tottenham Outrage and Siege of Sidney Street. Our Outrage article was written in mid 2016; the book was published in mid-2017 and there is no attribution or recognition of either article in the book. - SchroCat (talk) 22:57, 1 February 2024 (UTC)
 * That's sad, especially because the author likely made a profit out of that book... Oltrepier (talk) 21:45, 2 February 2024 (UTC)


 * The very first Wikipedia article I wrote in 2009 was a biography of an acclaimed Dutch-American coppersmith, Dirk van Erp. Roughly five years later, I was visiting a very well known Northern California art museum that I will not name. I noticed that they had a small temporary exhibition of eight or ten of van Erp's works, with a sign on the wall - a brief biography of the artist. Sure enough, about 2/3 was lifted word-for-word from my writing, without attribution. I felt a strange combination of pride and irritation. Cullen328 (talk) 01:48, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

A couple of years ago a local history page on Facebook that I follow included a piece that I recognized was taken word-for-word from what I had written in Wikipedia, without any attribution. I did complain to the admin for the page, and it was taken down. I am well aware that act will not stop or slow down plagiarism. - Donald Albury 09:04, 3 February 2024 (UTC)


 * Well over a decade ago, something I had written about an obscure facet of American telephone switching systems was proposed for deletion for copyviol. Turned out, it was vice versa. It was clear from our article history that I had written it bit by bit onwiki, and the British site had copied mine, not noticing that it was irrelevant to British switching practice at the time (and spelt in Yank style). Soon our copyright police became more thorough in their investigations. Jim.henderson (talk) 05:01, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Template:Backwards copy has its uses. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:30, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I had something similar come up during my GA of James Tissot with a pair of random art blogs. One was so lazy they actually copied the wikisource markup for the image files without copying the images themselves. Orchastrattor (talk) 16:21, 7 February 2024 (UTC)