Talk:List of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills episodes

Copyvio in split off season articles

(This is sort of just me taking notes as I go so I can keep track of the different moving pieces here.)

• The episode summaries at The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (season 1) reek of copyvio. The prose looks exactly like what would be provided as an official synopsis by a network hack, e.g. There is way too much tension among these Beverly Hills beauties, so Lisa decides to lighten the mood and set Kim up on a date with a millionaire friend of hers – so where does a standard date in Beverly Hills begin?
  • Another strong indicator of copyvio: these summaries are used in the Google Play store, e.g. here. While some outlets flout the attribution requirement of WP:REUSE when they copy text from Wikipedia, it's very unlikely that Google would be so careless. (And they have provided attribution when I've seen them reuse wiki content in other products, e.g. artist and album descriptions on YouTube Music)
  • Haven't found definitive proof of original source of text (though I suspect it to be Bravo)
• That content was split from this article. The version at creation contained mostly the same summaries for season 1, and for season 2 (which looks similarly suspicious, and was split off to The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (season 2)).
  • The creator was User:Zach464, who was long-ago banned for sockpuppetry. Looking at the contribs for that user (and their socks), I don't see any similar edits involving episode synopses that would need to be checked for copyvio, except maybe List of The Tom and Jerry Show (2014 TV series) episodes (version as of their last edit).
• Looking at other RHOBH season articles, 8 and 9 are fine - they include either no synopses, or very brief synopses that look very unlikely to have been copied. The other seasons should be individually checked for copyvio. The summaries in The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (season 11) in particular stand out as having a pretty suspiciously cutesy/PR tone. Googling a distinctive chunk of text finds it included on the Apple Tv page for the episode. No attribution to Wikipedia (and again, Apple is not the kind of company that's likely to get this wrong).
  • In that case, it looks like the summaries have all been added by IPs. At least one IP, Special:Contributions/187.162.37.96, has been doing this pretty flagrantly for months across multiple Housewives articles, and has previously been warned.

Next steps (I think - this is more or less my first time wading into copyright cleanup):

• Try to find definitive proof of copyvio (perhaps an archive.org snapshot of a site hosting the content prior to its appearance here?) and determine original source.
  • Having a hard time with this one. archive.org doesn't seem to have sufficiently frequent snapshots to catch the content before it gets here (assuming it's not originating here). What I'm generally seeing from googling is that the canned summaries are used widely across many big media sites (iTunes, streaming platforms, imdb and similar directories) but none of those sources attribute the ultimate source of the text. But again, it seems incredibly unlikely that they're all copying from Wikipedia and all violating the attribution requirement of WP:REUSE. Colin M (talk) 19:59, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
• Repeat for every RHOBH season article
  • A further wrinkle is that it seems in the case of the season 1 article, most of the summaries are copied, but not all? e.g. googling a distinctive string from our episode 11 summary, "childhood living on the streets of Paris and", only brings up our article, and a couple of obvious wiki mirrors. So each individual summary will have to be scrutinized, not just each list as a whole. earwig will be helpful here. Colin M (talk) 19:59, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
• Identify user(s) who introduced copyvio text, and warn them. (Or maybe refer to an admin if they've been unresponsive to previous warnings, such as the IP linked above)
  • Check those users' contribs for similar edits on other articles, esp. other housewives episode list articles.
• Maybe request some form of protection for articles that are at risk of continued copyvio additions from unregistered users (e.g. article on ongoing RHOBH season 11).

Yeesh. Colin M (talk) 19:16, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

Season checklist

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (season 1)

 Done Removed most summaries as total copyvios.

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (season 2)

 Done Some summaries completely removed. Some just needed a sentence or two to be rewritten or excised.

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (season 3)

Y No action required. Earwig found no copyvio (except a false +ve from a wiki mirror). (Summaries are noticeably shorter than the copyvio'd ones in previous season articles.)

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (season 4)

 Done Weirdly, seems like only the summaries for the last 4 episodes were plagiarized.

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (season 5)

Not sure Earwig finds lots of stretches of text that overlap with summaries on tvguide.com. Googling distinctive strings (e.g. "husband Harry Hamlin and magic man Penn Jillette") turns up matches on imdb, metacritic, and some more obscure aggregators. But unlike the more obvious copyvio, it doesn't appear on streaming platforms or official bravo pages. Plausible that these sites are just copying from us, but not clear.

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (season 6)

Not sure Same as above (except summaries are more or less identical, rather than merely having overlapping sentences/phrases).

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (season 7)

 Done All summaries completely nuked.

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (season 10)

Y No action required. Already clean.

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (season 11)

 Done Nuked.

Colin M (talk) 20:42, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

Contributors

• Seasons 1 and 2 summaries all added by User:Zach464, long-banned user.
• S4 copyvio introduced in Special:Diff/632486100. Notified Mymis on their talk page.
• S7: All summaries added by User:Livelikemusic. Example diffs: Special:Diff/754705777, Special:Diff/754907816, Special:Diff/755945720. Notified them on their talk page.
• S11: Mostly added by Special:Contributions/187.162.37.96. Also a couple stray additions from other IPs with few or no other edits: Special:Diff/1039536819, Special:Diff/1029160691. Referred case of the main culprit to to an admin familiar with copyright.

Colin M (talk) 21:48, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

Done?

I think I'm done here. Just for "fun", I hopped around to some season articles for other Housewives series, and sadly found a lot more similar copyvio, which I tried to clean up. One especially depressing case: User:Wikiims was banned for chronic copyvio, and a big CCI was conducted to find and sweep away all their copyvio additions. Unfortunately, in the case of the Housewives articles they edited, an IP editor went in and restored all the copyvio immediately after edits with the summary "Removed copyright violations; DO NOT RESTORE, SEE TALK PAGE". Of the 8 pages on which this happened, it was only noticed and reverted on 1 of them. (This was ~2 years ago)

If anyone cares to comb through the season articles for the other franchises more thoroughly, I guarantee there is a lot more copyvio to be cleaned up. The editors who work on copyright problems regularly are a special breed. WMF, please send them some satchels of gold - I know you can afford it. Colin M (talk) 00:41, 7 September 2021 (UTC)