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It's a fine policy, but I've seen how it can be problematic in practice. Procampur and Tsurlagol were originally plagiarised before I began rewriting and developing them, but as per the policy, they needed to be deleted and recreated. So User:Cronje and I made back-up pages for my original and new work, I waited until they were deleted and and reinstated fresh, then published the new pages. Another case was Shar, which was formerly an original work (AFAIK), then someone added plagiarised information and it had to be deleted and remade as before, but lost its history.
The current deletion and recreation process loses the revision history, which loses all record of editors' work ("Who wrote this?") and makes it impossible for an editor to investigate the prior history if they need to ("What happened to this citation?"). Plus, editors lose credit for their work. Is it possible for an administrator to restore revision history as well, or to undo the edit and selectively remove history?
It's relatively a lot of effort, and a bad way to vandalise the wiki: stick some plagiarised material on Drizzt, then watch an admin waste some time deleting it and remaking it, with history wiped.
I don't think we need to go to these lengths. Anyone who wants to pirate a sourcebook won't be scouring an article history on the off-chance they find something, they can just download it. Few users will even look at the history, only fussy editors. In the history, it's effectively buried and forgotten. Total deletion is also not a policy I've seen on other wikis, such as Memory Beta, where plagiarised text is simply undone, removed, or rewritten.
I'm fine with deleting a fresh page that only contains plagiarised material (e.g., -6400 DR), whether from a newbie or some old cruft: nothing is lost by losing it. But if it contains/contained original work as well (e.g., the latest revision to Lantan), I think it would be better to simply undo it, remove the offending text, or rewrite it. In addition, information that is freely available online, such as in a web enhancement, is fairly safe to simply undo or cut.
To clarify: I entirely agree that we should get rid of plagiarised material. I just want to discuss and adjust the way we handle its removal.
Has WotC been a problem about that sort of thing? I know sites like Crystal Keep (?) were cut back, but they showed all the crunch. Anyway, I've been researching plagiarism policies at other wikias, and will get back when I have good list of examples.
Okay, I'm back and I bear copyright and plagiarism policies! :D I went through some bigger, more developed wikias that I had bookmarked. My other haunt, Memory Beta, simply follows Memory Alpha (both Star Trek-based); the policies are discussed here and here. In these, it's encouraged to simply remove or rewrite the plagiarised/copyright infringing text. It's stated that the history isn't easily accessible to general readers, and that maintaining the rest of the revision history is desired. Only pages where the entire content is plagiarised should be deleted. Apparently, it's possible for administrators, designated agents and/or developers to selectively remove history of offending content.
The great Star Wars Wookieepedia has much the same policy, here.
The big one, Wikipedia, has more legalese: here. Again, they say to simply remove the offending text, or delete the page if the entirety of it is copied.
So, (fortunately for me) it's just what I said above. Like the bigger wikis, we can simply undo, remove or rewrite offending material from existing pages, or delete pages that only contain offending material. We don't have to delete and restore otherwise good pages. On the off-chance someone complains, there must be a way of removing it from the history.
Still, I believe we can get away with doing what the rest of Wikia and Wikipedia itself do, as I described above, namely to simply rewrite and forget about the revision history. That will make it easier still for any user to rewrite an article, preserve a history, and skip the deletion/restoration procedure. But given the extent of the problem here, I can accept a hardline approach against it.
To rewrite or not to rewrite
So, would it be okay all round to just delete these pages out of hand, provided they only contain copied material? Then we'd only need to rewrite and save those mingled with properly rewritten material.
This is pretty much what we were doing before. So, I guess I'm just looking for an excuse to give up. :)
I'm in favour of putting them in a list somewhere for interested users to rewrite and rehabilitate. User:Ijkay has done a good job on that. If no-one's interested in touching them, they should probably be deleted after a while.
I'll try to make a Template:Plagiarism and associated category for this purpose, and begin updating our known copied pages.
Alright, I've made the template (I copied the Deletion template, ironically enough). The pages will appear in Category:Plagiarized articles. They'll also still appear in Category:Articles nominated for deletion since they are still, officially, nominated for deletion by virtue of being copied.
If you have any suggestions, let me know.
To delete or not to delete
- No known relation to setting — automatic deletion
- Known relation to setting, or is taken from setting material — keep for rehabilitation
- Purely copied — automatic deletion
- Partially copied, partially original — keep for rehabilitation.
That's half going back to what we were doing before. What do you think?