MoscowBatman

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It appears that I am doing something wrong, but I can't figure out what. I am trying to fix the South End, Springfield, Massachusetts article. It contains cut-and-pasted prose from the Springfield, Massachusetts website. The website has been re-done since the text was added (pretty, but lousy in terms of content) but you can see the original from the wayback machine at [1].

The article on Wikipedia read, "South End is the smallest of the seventeen neighborhoods of the city of Springfield, Massachusetts. It is located immediately south of Metro Center. It contains 196 acres (79 ha) of land, plus streets and railroads. Its boundaries are Union and Howard Streets to the north; Mill Street, Mill River and Main Street to the south; Maple Street to the east; and Interstate 91 to the west, which separates it from the Connecticut River and the Basketball Hall of Fame museum and entertainment complex.".

The City website, last updated February 19, 2009, read, "South End is the smallest of the city's seventeen neighborhoods, and is located immediately south of the Central Business District. It contains 196 acres of land, plus streets and railroads. Its boundaries are Union and Howard Streets to the north; Mill Street, Mill River and Main Street to the south; Maple Street to the east; and the Connecticut River to the west.". The City website has a copyright notice on it, so it doesn't appear to be public domain text.

This article was one of many neighborhood articles that was created by JWM83, and I noticed that all the neighborhood articles he created around the same time used cut and pasted text from the same site, different, but linked, pages. This article was one of many, and not the first one I fixed.

I looked it up on the Wikipedia Help pages. Sorry, I can't find an exact link that I was reading now, since there seem to be a TON of duplicate, somewhat contradictory, and totally confusing articles about what to do about plagiarism on Wikipedia, and I can't find anything similar to what I was looking at. The one that I was looking at told me to remove the text that was cut and pasted, and paste a link to the page that it was cut and pasted from in the edit summary. So that's what I did, and I did it for all of the neighborhoods that I found on the city website. All of them were created by the same person, who is long gone.

I thought I was doing the right thing, but on the South End article other people have come along and put the plagiarism back in. One person didn't say anything except put the article back the way it was. Then I fixed it again and I got a notice from an automated system that told me that I shouldn't have done that, but if I thought I was right, I should leave a message for it, remove the warning, and fix it again, so I did. Then a third person came along, put it back the way it was, and told me that I shouldn't have done it. He said I should contact him on his talk page, so I did, but apparently he stopped editing as soon as I posted my message on his page, and the article is back to its original state.

So what am I doing wrong?

MoscowBatman (talk) 09:45, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Not only are you doing nothing wrong, but this is important work, and I thank you for it. You should be pinged to my edit summary where I reverted the reversion of you, and have pinged the two editors there as well, highlighting the issue. By the way, if you don't know, after reverting such copyright infringement, the next step is to tag the article to have its history scrubbed of the infringement, using {{Copyvio-revdel}}. I'm taking care of scrubbing the history of this one right now. Best regards--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:33, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll put that tag on the other articles I cleaned up. MoscowBatman (talk) 23:28, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

MoscowBatman, Thank-you very much for tracking these problems down and flagging them. I see someone else cleared some of your RD1 requests, I think I just finished the rest. As Fuhghettaboutit said, this is important work, not often undertaken by new editors. Thanks. S Philbrick(Talk) 16:27, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

MoscowBatman, I'll also add that you are exactly right that we have "a TON of duplicate, somewhat contradictory, and totally confusing articles about what to do about plagiarism on Wikipedia". A few years ago, I decided to clean up some of our copyright advice but I'm sorry to report that the task was more than I could take on. Unfortunately, unlike many aspects of Wikipedia, it's not the type of thing that one can pick away at. To do it right,one needs to complete a full inventory of all copyright related pages, figure out what ought to be retained and what ought to be excised, and that's a challenging task. S Philbrick(Talk) 16:32, 9 March 2019 (UTC)