Thirsty4waters
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John Williams (West Virginia politician)
editHi Thirsty4waters. On 15 November 2020, you created a page in your userspace for the West Virginian politician named John Williams. A few hours after you published your draft, another user named Elmssuper essentially stole your draft, and it eventually got published in mainspace as John Williams (West Virginia politician). That user has now been blocked for other reasons, but I wanted to let you know because I have merged the history of your former userspace draft into the John Williams (West Virginia politician) article so that the history now shows you as the creator of the article. All the best, Mz7 (talk) 01:14, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
- @Mz7: Oh my God, thank you so much! I actually discovered that my article was stolen about five hours before you merged the history and notified me, and I have spent the last several hours looking through every applicable policy I could find, i.e., WP:COPY, WP:PLAG, etc. I've had my account for several years now but am still relatively new to editing and creating articles, so I was extremely angry and upset when I realized that someone had taken all my hard work for themselves—even going back to my draft article more than once to add my own subsequent revisions to their published article. If you wouldn't mind awfully, could you please help me understand the WP:POLICY surrounding this issue a bit better? I am generally familiar (a lot more familiar after this afternoon's research) with WP:LU, WP:REUSE, WP:COPYPASTE, and WP:COPYWITHIN, but I feel as though these articles seem to imply that it is fine to copy draft articles verbatim and then publish as one's own (as has happened here), so long as WP:ATTREQ is followed. However, and I may be wrong, but it seems to me that such a verbatim copy-paste should qualify for WP:SPEEDY, although WP:G12 does not appear to allow this, instead referring editors to WP:COPYVIO (I assume so that WP:MERGEHISTORY can be considered by an administrator—quite like you've done here). Would I be correct in that understanding? And, if so, would you be so kind as to point me in the direction of where I may bring up my concerns to have WP:POLICY better reflect that WP:COPYPASTE situations such as this are unequivocally unacceptable, and to create an easier or more easily understandable process for reporting such?
- And, one last question, if you wouldn't mind: how did you come to find that my draft article had been stolen? I'm genuinely curious, because you found out about the same time that I did! Again, I appreciate you endlessly—you are truly my Wiki Angel, haha :)
- thirsty 03:10, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
- An editor had sent me an email which contained evidence that the user that stole your draft might be a sockpuppet account (which it was), and I discovered this situation while following up on that concern. Fortunately, I think cases like this where a user deliberately plagiarizes another Wikipedia editor's work are rare, and I would be quite surprised if it ever happened again to you specifically. On the off-chance that it does, I would probably start by contacting the user that did the copy-pasting on their user talk page—not to accuse them of anything, but to ask why they did it. Oftentimes, it's a relatively new editor that attempted in good faith to move an article to a new title, but they did so incorrectly by cutting-and-pasting content from one location to another. In that case, the usual solution is to request a history merge. WP:RIA has some additional advice: according to that page, another solution is to make a dummy edit with an edit summary that provides the proper attribution/credit. If you aren't satisfied with the user's response, then it might be a good idea to contact an administrator and ask them to take a look at the situation (my user talk page is always open if you ever need help
). Regarding WP:G12, usually we only use G12 in cases where a user has copied information from a source outside of Wikipedia—in general, if there is an alternative to deletion, we try to gravitate towards the alternative. Overall, this is a relatively complicated area of Wikipedia policy, and I think the reason why the policies don't unequivocally advocate deletion is because most of the time this happens it's not because of malice but because of an honest mistake by another editor. I hope this information is helpful to you—let me know if you have any other questions. Mz7 (talk) 04:08, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
- An editor had sent me an email which contained evidence that the user that stole your draft might be a sockpuppet account (which it was), and I discovered this situation while following up on that concern. Fortunately, I think cases like this where a user deliberately plagiarizes another Wikipedia editor's work are rare, and I would be quite surprised if it ever happened again to you specifically. On the off-chance that it does, I would probably start by contacting the user that did the copy-pasting on their user talk page—not to accuse them of anything, but to ask why they did it. Oftentimes, it's a relatively new editor that attempted in good faith to move an article to a new title, but they did so incorrectly by cutting-and-pasting content from one location to another. In that case, the usual solution is to request a history merge. WP:RIA has some additional advice: according to that page, another solution is to make a dummy edit with an edit summary that provides the proper attribution/credit. If you aren't satisfied with the user's response, then it might be a good idea to contact an administrator and ask them to take a look at the situation (my user talk page is always open if you ever need help
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