Reporting the suspicion to the publisher should be enough, I wouldn't think of that as unethical. You aren't doing immediate harm to the author; presumably any reasonable publisher would ask the author about the situation before taking drastic action, giving the author the opportunity at that time to claim the Wikipedia content as his or her own. The author makes an explicit claim of authorship when he or she publishes the content; verifying that claim (especially against a competing claim) is not "outing" in any sense, in my opinion.
On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 12:43 PM, James Heilman <jmh...@gmail.com> wrote: > Someone has posted a question about WP:OUTING. We are currently dealing > with a copyright issue ( a textbook has copied liberally from Wikipedia > without proper attribution and the author claiming the work as their own ). > Before we inform the publisher however we need to make sure that the author > of the book is not a Wikipedia editor who wrote the original content and > than released it under a different license. In this instance this was not > the case. > > However is the simply fact of attempting to verify that an author is not a > Wikipedian considered WP:OUTING? Not attempting to verify it before > informing the publisher and amazon however would be unethical as we may > harm someones career and need to make sure we are correct. Other peoples > thoughts? > > -- > James Heilman > MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian > > The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine > www.opentextbookofmedicine.com > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
