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Source of text?
editThe bulk of this article, particularly the "Life history and habitat requirements" and "Current and historical distribution" sections, seem overly technical, detailed, and while well referenced, the references are not footnoted as is common in Wikipedia. I don't want to necessarily accuse anyone of plagarism, but the Wiki guideline says:
Plagiarized text usually demonstrates a sudden change of style and tone from a writer's usual style; it is often more advanced in grammar and vocabulary. Plagiarized material may contain unexplained acronyms or technical jargon (that had been described in an earlier part of the plagiarized document). Because plagiarized material was written for other purposes, it is often slightly off topic or unencyclopedic in tone.
Does anyone else think the text in this article is a bit odd? Just running a couple sentences through Google, I didn't come up with any non-Wikipedia hits. If this text was pasted directly out of a college biology paper, for example, is that ok as long as it was written by the wiki editor? --BlueCanoe (talk) 21:40, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
- This article is unusually detailed, and seems for the most part the work of someone who is very familiar with the current ESA situations with the species. It could be the large chunks that cite Moyle (2002) are plagiarized (I know Moyle and think it is worth emailing him to ask) and other big pieces may have been pulled from ESA technical documents. As for referencing style, this is standard scientific citation style, at least in the fisheries literature. I'm not all that concerned. I don't think it is a good article, being quite unbalanced, and not giving a good overall picture of the species, but again, that kind of unbalance is not unusual. People contribute according to their interests.----Busaccsb (talk) 13:58, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
- Almost everything was added by user:Mikesbrain in a series of edits from August 2007. It is an exact copy of various sections in chapter 8 in USBR's Biological Assessment on the Continued Long-term Operations of the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project. published in August 2008. Therein lies the problem. Normally I would have removed all, per WP:COPYVIO, but here it appears it was added to the wiki article a year before the official publication! It is highly unlikely USBR would copy huge sections from wikipedia and the format and language is typical of USBR's publications, but not typical of wikipedia articles. This leaves some questions:
- Almost everything was added by user:Mikesbrain in a series of edits from August 2007. It is an exact copy of various sections in chapter 8 in USBR's Biological Assessment on the Continued Long-term Operations of the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project. published in August 2008. Therein lies the problem. Normally I would have removed all, per WP:COPYVIO, but here it appears it was added to the wiki article a year before the official publication! It is highly unlikely USBR would copy huge sections from wikipedia and the format and language is typical of USBR's publications, but not typical of wikipedia articles. This leaves some questions:
- Was it published elsewhere first? Sometimes URBR publications are featured elsewhere before they are made available on USBR's page. If so, the wiki editor could have copied it from there to wikipedia, in which case it is copyvio and should be deleted.
- Was the editor involved in USBR's publications; perhaps an author? If so, he/she could have added it both to wiki and the USBR publication. We could have asked the editor, but unfortunately he/she has not been active on wikipedia since 2007. Assuming he/she was an USBR author, does he/she have the rights to publish it elsewhere? In some cases copyrights of scientific reports made while hired for specific agencies/companies lie with that agency/company, meaning that the author need authorization by the agency/company to publish it elsewhere (e.g. on wiki). My knowledge of U.S. copyright rules and URBR guidelines on this are lacking. 62.107.195.80 (talk) 17:28, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
- See Wikipedia:Copyright problems/2014 April 10. :) Fortunately, the content is public domain. As I noted there, since the publication on Wikipedia predates the USBR publication and since there is one error in the Wikipedia content that the author himself fixed, it's a little less likely that he copied it (with said error) from another source. But, being public domain, the issue would be one of plagiarism and not copyvio. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 11:53, 18 April 2014 (UTC)
I have removed the copyright complaint template, since no one has provided any evidence that it is a copyright issue and it has been many months now. Indeed the source appears to be in the public domain. If there's an issue with plagiarism, or other issues, they should be solved by editing, not by blanking the entire page. --Hibernian (talk) 03:02, 15 October 2014 (UTC)