On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 7:51 AM, David Gerard <[email protected]> wrote: > On 29 January 2010 01:35, David Goodman <[email protected]> wrote: > >> (Incidentally, a fair number of the unsourced BLPs are in fact >> copyvios, and when I see that, I speedy deleted on that ground, unless >> it seems important enough to rewrite. ) > > Take care there - I increasingly see website bios that are basically > the Wikipedia bio copied, 'cos they liked it!
This is especially the case if the initial draft of the biography was reasonably well done and did not change much or at all for the next few years. One of the ways to normally check which came first is to see if the Wikipedia article has evolved naturally from a stub to something longer, but Wikipedians writing adequate bios from scratch can incorrectly get accused of copyvios if the Wikipedia page is copied without attribution, especially of the person republishing it without attribution doesn't give a publication date. *We* have a date for each version of an article, but some sloppy websites don't give dates for what they publish, or even a credit line for whoever is claiming credit for the writing, so it is difficult to see what came first. The worst cases are when supposedly respectable publications and writers do this (e.g. newspapers and journalists), but those are rarer now. But yeah, lots of stubby BLPs are bios, sometimes directly copied by the subject themselves (or a friend or fan) from the subject's own website or from a website they (even as the subject) have no permission to copy. Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
