Talk:Erich Berneker

Copyright status (from help desk)

Currently the article on Erich Berneker is pretty much just a translation of the corresponding article on enciklopedija.hr (Hrvatska enciklopedija), which is copyrighted; much the same text is found on ru.wiki too. Does this constitute plagarism and/or a breach of copyright? What should be done about it, if yes? — Phazd (talk|contribs) 23:04, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

@Phazd: Please investigate further. Our article has been in place since 2014, so there is a possibility that the copy went in the other direction. If by "ru.wiki" you mean the Russian Wikipedia, you can check the creation date there. I don't know about the other one. neither of them is older than ours, as do not need to do anything, but you might put a note on the article's talk page with the results of your investigation. If either if them is older, come back here. -Arch dude (talk) 00:42, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Hello, Phazd. Can you determine whether the content originated on ru.wikipedia.org or on Hrvatska enciklopedija? If the first, then there the only problem is to properly attribute the source. If the second, there may well be a copyright violation. If the content originated on the English Wikipedia, then there is no problem. Cullen328 (talk) 00:55, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

@Arch dude @Cullen328 It's trivial to prove that the source is Hrv. enc. The earliest version of the WP article on Berneker, from 2014, cites Hrv. enc. at the end of each of its three paragraphs (the editor who created the article is a native Croatian speaker) - it would make no sense for Hrv. enc. to copy from a WP article that is itself entirely sourced from Hrv. enc. Also, the Russian version was created in 2020 by translation from English - it says so in the edit history there... Not to mention Hrv. enc. is a respectable encyclopedia that was published in print before Wikipedia existed; their online text on Berneker has remained nearly unchanged since 2014 - the page was saved on Archive.org immediately after the WP page was created). Since 2014 only one sentence, on Berneker's editorship of "Archiv...", has been added to Hrv. enc. – which is also the only sentence that is missing from the WP article. — Phazd (talk|contribs) 03:51, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Arch dude (talk) 16:31, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

@Phazd and Cullen328:The status is ambiguous. The article basically showed up on the same day in two places. The highest probability is that a single individual generated this article and added it in both places. If so it is not a copyright violation, since an author (and copyright holder) is free to copy the author's own work. I do not think should take any action based on copyright, but see next section. -Arch dude (talk) 16:38, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

@Arch dude Actually, the status is not ambiguous as long as you take the time to read about Hrv. enc. (I linked the WP article) and use some logic. There's actually no reason to assume the article showed up in two places at the same time. Archive.org does not crawl every page everywhere as it appears, and as enciklopedija.hr existed since 2013, it is likely, to say the least, that the article existed there before it existed on WP, and was crawled precisely because it was linked on WP. There are also several other illogical things that you propose. Firstly, that someone could bother to use some sources to write the article for HE, but then didn't use those same sources on WP, instead only citing HE. Secondly, that HE is written by random casual users just like WP, and not by the Lexicographic Institute "Miroslav Krleža" (I assure you that the user who created WP article is not a professional in linguistics who would be assigned to edit such articles in the Lexicographic Institute, and then even translating them into English and posting them to WP in their free time).

Since you're oddly intent on your idea that an established lexicographic institution copy-pastes from Wikipedia, when I was at the library yesterday I checked the print edition of HE – I repeat, older than WP itself – and there it is, in the second volume, published in 2000, the same text you can find on the 2014 crawl of HE on archive.org.

Now, is this plagarism, or copyright infringement, and what should be done about it?

— Phazd (talk|contribs) 05:12, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

@Phazd: Thanks for the research. It's a clear copyvio. The page should be blanked. It can then be replaced with a translation from the German page, which does not appear to have a problem. I do not read German. If you do and if you are willing, please do the translation. -Arch dude (talk) 06:31, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

@Arch dude I will try to write the article anew, as I've managed to find some materials that the German article doesn't make use of (though ofc I'll make use of the German text too whenever appropriate). — Phazd (talk|contribs) 22:44, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Notability?

I cannot find much at all about this particular Erich Berneker except for stuff that is based on either Wikipedia or the Croation article. I will prod the article. --Arch dude (talk) 16:41, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

OK another editor de-prodded after finding a ref that seems to establish notability here [1]. -Arch dude (talk) 02:53, 23 February 2024 (UTC)