Talk:Hilaria rigida

Copyright problem removed

Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: Mojave Desert Wildflowers, by Pam MacKay. Copied or closely paraphrased material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.) For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, and according to fair use may copy sentences and phrases, provided they are included in quotation marks and referenced properly. The material may also be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Therefore such paraphrased portions must provide their source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 08:09, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

What are some examples of "The material was copied from: Mojave Desert Wildflowers, by Pam MacKay"? If there are examples, how do these examples differ from the original source content for the MDW source, i.e., Jepson? FloraWilde (talk) 02:09, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

Fair question. With this edit you added the text:

it is common on sandy soils, desert dry washes, and sand dunes below 4,000'

The MacKay book reads:

Big galleta is common on sandy soils, washes, and dunes below 4,000'

I don't see that text on this page. Do you? Nor do I see anything that resembles:

After the flower spikelets fall, the stalks they were attached to remain on the plant as wavy, wiry extensions

which you added with this edit, and closely resembles the more grammatical

After the spikelets fall the stalks to which they were attached remain on the plant and stick up as wavy, wiry extensions."

in the MacKay book. I'm not trying to suggest that all the content in that book is necessarily original, though I've seen no evidence that it isn't; but it is definitely unacceptable by our standards to copy directly from it. Whether or not that book is a reliable source is a separate question – hasn't this plant been covered in the academic literature? Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 10:01, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

• 1.) There are no citations of any "material was copied from" Mackay. There are clauses clipped from longer sentences that paraphrase the information sourced by Mackay, but which more closely resemble passages on Jepson. These are not copyright violations of MacKay, nor of material in other sources which they even more closely resemble, as follows.

• 2.)The MacKay book reads:

Big galleta is common on sandy soils, washes, and dunes below 4,000'

You said and asked, "I don't see that text on this (Jepson) page Do you?"

The Jepson link you cite says

"Common.... flats, and washes, sand dunes... Elevation: < 1600 m (4,800 ft) ... distribution: ... Mojave Desert, Sonoran Desert"

I wrote -

"It grows in the Mojave Desert and Sonoran Desert to Sonora, Mexico, (sic) [where] it is common on sandy soils, desert dry washes, and sand dunes below 4,000'"

My edit is closer to Jepson than to MacKay. It is not "directly copying" from either Mackay or Jepson. It is not a "blatant copyright violation".

• 3.) You are correct that the Mackay content goes beyond what is in Jepson, which says only "inflorescence... axis wavy" -

"inflorescence... spikelets in clusters... falling as 1 unit; axis wavy

MacKay wrote,

"After the spikelets fall the stalks to which they were attached remain on the plant and stick up as wavy, wiry extensions."

My edit comes from lecture notes taken in a field class given by Mark Wheeler at the Desert Institute in Joshua Tree National Monument. Wheeler was talking about what he called a plants "gestalt", whereby one can identify some plants it at a glance. As an example, he pointed to the wavy, wiry looking naked inflorescence stalks remaining on a clump of H. rigida.

Here is my full edit from which a clause is cited above -

"After the flower spikelets fall, the stalks they were attached to remain on the plant as wavy, wiry extensions, by which the species may be identified at a glance."

What MacKay wrote goes beyond Jepson. What I wrote goes beyond Mackay. My edit is different from Mackay not only in wording, but in that it has a totally different emphasis - identification at a glance. A criticism of my edit is that it is not fully supported by MacKay, which is very different from being a copyright violation of MacKay. This is not a "blatant copyright violation" or "directly copied from" MacKay. The notes paraphrasing Wheeler's lecture are not copyrighted, so my edit is not a copyright violation of Wheeler, either.

• 4. There is not much latitude in wording sentences with this basic plant information: 1. Habitat and range, 2. growth pattern, 3. description of leaves and stems, 4. description of inflorescence and fruit, and 5. bloom time. Writing articles with this basic information may result in content that appears similar to what is in field guides used as a source. Since most field guides try to use standardized botanical terminology when possible, the language will be very similar for that content. This is not "direct copying", and is not a "blantant copyright violation". Use of the standardized information content and standardized nomenclature in articles on plants may appear to be a copyright violation to editors not used to this standardized content and language. But it is not a copyright violation. Please restore the deleted edits. FloraWilde (talk) 11:34, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

While this is not an official discussion, I do want to support FloraWilde here, this is clearly not plagiarism. That requires a text to be copied, while here only factual fragments of sentences, that cannot be otherwise reworded without losing information, are re-used with proper citation. Sentences closely resembling sentences from the cited work is inevitable when writing a scientific article with scarce sources. Dunditschia (talk) 18:33, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Is there an official discussion somewhere else? FloraWilde (talk) 22:01, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Not as far as I know. There should probably be, this is absurd. Dunditschia (talk) 17:59, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

Even if my edits are restored, Justlettersandnumbers raises a good question. In botany, topic sections, their content, and even the words themselves (nomenclature), are pretty much standardized. So Wiki articles may appear to plagiarize the sources, and the sources may appear to plagiarize other sources, when this is not the case. In botany articles, this does not violate copyright policy at Wiki. But in other fields, e.g., biographies of presidents, this would be a clear violation of the Wiki copyright policy. Without knowing about a field having standardized topics, content, and language, how can an editor from outside a field know when it is, and is not, a copyright violation? The Wiki policy does not make this clear, since it cannot cover niceties of every field. Justlettersandnumbers raises a good question, even if my edits end up being restored. (I put this same comment on two other pages with similar discussions.) FloraWilde (talk) 13:15, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

Justlettersandnumbers, please check revisions here.

And here is the comparison from where I first found the article, to my most recent edit. FloraWilde (talk) 23:27, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

Attention needed

I've attempted to clean up after the recent move; I'm not even sure whether the move was correct. It'd be good if an expert would run an eye over this. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 08:09, 29 June 2014 (UTC)