Talk:International Jewish Correspondence

Copyright concerns and notability

I came here after seeing this listed at Wikipedia:Copyright problems. I don't think this was copied from anywhere. However, I'm quite sure it was written by someone very close to the IJC or its founder, hence the tone of the writing, some of which I have now copy-edited for encyclopedic style. The IJC had been defunct for four years before this article was even created. I did find find one newspaper article from 1987 (now added as a reference), but it was clearly not a copy of that. The only other source I could find was a brief listing in a directory of Jewish organizations [1]. The Canadian Jewish Congress which had sponsored the initiative, is also now defunct, as is their website.

I'm not sure that this subject meets the notability requirements for a stand-alone article and perhaps ought to be merged into Canadian Jewish Congress. Voceditenore (talk) 18:26, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

I think are right about how to deal with possible copyvio. It is hard to distinguish between something copied from a PR page and something written originally, but in analogous fashion--especially when the possible original is not longer accessible. So we ought to judge it in its own right. Your suggested merge seems an excellent solution--I suggest you just go ahead and do it.

And this is the sort of thing that people are increasingly studying--if a book or a thesis or whatever appears, the merge can always be expanded into a separate article. DGG ( talk ) 07:11, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

I've been bold and carried this out. Voceditenore (talk) 07:58, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

I see you added some references; I really do not think it's enough to support a separate article yet: the first ref is just a directory listing. But I won't object if you want to do it, though. Possibly someone else will, so you should think whether you could defend it at AfD. AfD is impossible to predict, but I think the odds are it will be deleted. Your call. DGG ( talk ) 18:49, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

I already made the call yesterday. :) By "carried this out", I meant I had carried out the merge. I added a copy-edited version of the text + refs to Canadian Jewish Congress#Post–World War II and left International Jewish Correspondence as a redirect. I think this is the best way to preserve the material and make it accessible via searches. In my view, it would almost certainly fail an AfD as a stand-alone article, and rightly so. I had searched extensively for further sources/references and what's there is all I could find—a brief directory entry and an article in a local newspaper. If it had gone to AfD, I would have !voted "merge". The redirect can always be undone and the separate article restored if anything else turns up in future, although I highly doubt if it will. Voceditenore (talk) 05:21, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

You are completely right that as part of the contents of the article there is not the least problem--the contents of an article need not be each part of it notable, just relevant and sourced, which it is. I thought you were asking about reconstituting the part on International Jewish Correspondence as a separate article--only then is there a problem. We are agreed about this, I think. DGG ( talk ) 14:12, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

We are. I think you're confusing me with the editor who asked you this question at your talk page. Voceditenore (talk) 06:17, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

• Update: After yet more searching, I find that the original text of this article was virtually identical to:

The Canadian Jewish Heritage Network. International Jewish Correspondence (Canadian Jewish Congress Charities Committee National Archives Fonds description No. I0084).

I suspect the timeline here is that the text originally came from the fonds description at the Canadian Jewish Congress Charities Committee National Archives. (The founder of the International Jewish Correspondence donated its papers to the archives when the IJC became defunct in 2002.) The Canadian Jewish Heritage Network website appears to have been started in 2010 and provides copies of fonds descriptions from various Canadian Jewish archives and libraries that were previously unavailable on the internet. Consequently, to be on the safe side, I've rewritten the merged text even more. Voceditenore (talk) 10:07, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

actually, I'm not that surprised. I am beginning to think that everything in Wikipedia describing an organization or person written with some degree of grammatical competence & organization, but not specifically aimed to take advantage of our features, and where most of it is contributed by a single person, is a copyvio or close paraphrase. DGG ( talk ) 14:12, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

Yep, that's my view too. It's rampant, and only a fraction of it can ever be discovered or dealt with, given the time-sink it involves. We can't just delete or stubify on a hunch, although I am very sorely tempted at times. I'd much rather be writing real articles on real encyclopedic subjects. And, we're going to keep getting more and more of this stuff since a significant and ever-growing proportion of our "contributors" think the WP motto is

"Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that anyone can use for free publicity"

OK, rant over. :) Voceditenore (talk) 06:17, 15 May 2012 (UTC)