Apparently some people find it easier to copy-paste text from other sources, including Wikipedia or the creator's original site, instead of coming up with their own text.
However, this could get the website in a ton of legal trouble for plagiarism and/or copyright violations. (Not to mention it's lazy writing to boot.) Since stopping that problem is a very high priority, and I've observed multiple cases of this problem as of late, let's give this its own dedicated clean-up thread. If you see any work, character, or recap descriptions that copy another source word-for-word, bring them up here if you're not sure how to immediately fix them.
Moderator notice: If you cannot immediately rewrite plagiarized text, remove it and put in a placeholder note. A sample follows:
[This description was copied in violation of our [[Administrivia/AboutImagesAndCopyright Plagiarism]] policy. Please replace it with original writing.]
Below is a list of currently known pages that suffer from this problem, and the source they copy from. (This list can be updated by mods or by me, Totemic Hero.) The ideal goal is to have these pages fixed within a week or two of finding out about the copy-paste. If we can't manage to come up with a fix in that time frame, then we'll probably have to outright Cut List said pages, because the site can't risk legal issues.
Currently known pages with copied text
Characters.Overwatch - Character descriptions partially copied from Blizzard's official siteRecap.American Horror Story - Recap descriptions mostly copied from the show's wiki
Recap.Charmed - A number of recap descriptions are copied from the show's wiki
Characters.Smite - Character descriptions transcribed from the character videos
Literature.Repairman Jack - Parts of work description copied from Wikipedia
Characters.Infinite Crisis - Parts copied from old version of official website (needs checking to see if still there)
WesternAnimation.Happy Ness The Secret Of The Loch - Description copied from VHS tape box
ComicBook.Alpha Gods - Part of work description copied from official website
Music.Among The Living - Part of description copied from Wikipedia
Creator.Kurt Sutter - Part of description copied from Wikipedia
Fanfic.Past Sins - Work description copied from host site
TabletopGame.Beyond The Supernatural - Work description copied from Wikipedia
Creator.Van Beuren Studios - Description apparently copied from a blog
Main.Footnote Fever - Text of a number of examples copied from Wikipedia
WesternAnimation.Camberwick Green - Part of description copied from Wikipedia
Series.Weinerville - Part of description copied from official website
Film.Yamashita The Tigers Treasure - Description copied from Wikipedia
Creator.David Lowery - Description copied from Wikipedia
Creator.Raphael Bob Waksberg - Description copied from Wikipedia
Creator.Kazuki Takahashi - Majority of description copied from Wikipedia
VideoGame.Action Taimanin - Many examples copied from the AllTheTropes wiki, including on subpages
Edited by MacronNotes on Mar 25th 2023 at 5:26:38 AM
Seven years after it was brought up, I've noticed and fixed the page description for Happy Ness: The Secret of the Loch, along with a few other parts of the page.
Until next time...
Anon e Mouse Jr.
If you're responding directly to one of my posts, please ping me to make sure I see it.
Ironically this a copy paste of my own post over on the recap policy thread but:
I've not looked at the other Buffy episode recaps but I stumbled across this page a couple of days ago:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS2E20GoFish
And it seems to be more or less exactly the same as the summary on the Buffy fan wiki here:
https://buffy.fandom.com/wiki/Go_Fish
It's really long and seems to be a play by play of almost every scene in the episode. And I think it's in the wrong sort of tense for a recap but I may be wrong?
~Amonimus then suggested I point it out here because looking at the edit where it was added: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/article_history.php?article=Recap.BuffyTheVampireSlayerS2E20GoFish&more=t#edit8751799 it's from 2016, whereas the Fandom page has had the text since 2008.
I've cut the recap description and added the note.
Friends forevermore
Eighth Doctor Adventures Interference Book One and Eighth Doctor Adventures Interference Book Two claim to be copied from the other wiki, but a quick check of the edit histories over there shows no copying...
I had a dog-themed avatar before it was cool.
Space Molly Weasley
Kitaria Fables' description is copy-pasted from its Steam page. Will blank it with the notice shortly. And done.
Edited by TroperNo9001 on Dec 25th 2023 at 5:16:31 PM
"Anemone dear, I know you want to be more independent from me, but... please take care, okay?"
he/him | Image Pickin' regular
Starting from the second paragraph, the description of We Are Magical Boys is copied from the scanlation group that translated it.
Anime Guy
There’s been a real issue discovered about some of the Doctor Who recap trivia pages.
Troper Trooper 924 initially discovered and posted here about how Day of the Daleks’ page had cribbed directly from the Doctor Who wiki (specifically the Notes section). They also said that there were more examples.
In my own research (and presumably Trooper’s too), most of said episodes are from the Jon Pertwee/Third Doctor era. Each of the trivia pages have one or two examples which are then blatantly plagiarized from the Doctor Who wiki (a major exception being “Planet Of The Spiders”).
EDIT: Decided to confront the wiki plagiarism myself, and have finished re-editing the first season. It also seems like the Doctor Who wiki has been at times cribbing from a comprehensive guide by Shannon Sullivan. Just letting anyone know if they find this post later.
![[down]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_down.png "[down]"){kind=icon}
Oh sorry.
Edited by CanuckMcDuck1 on Jan 3rd 2024 at 6:34:47 AM
I’m sorry, but you have Stage 9 Animes.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Beat me to it. I also looked at some earlier episodes, including the very first episode, and they also have copied material.
Edited by Trooper924 on Dec 31st 2023 at 2:33:49 PM
Several of the Dungeons & Dragons character pages have lifted text directly from other websites. For example, the Dungeons And Dragons Real World Deities A To F has a folder for the Babylonian pantheon whose introductory text is taken almost word for word from a Planescape wiki—which, in all likelihood, plagiarized its text from one of the Planescape sourcebooks.
See the screenshot below for a side-by-side comparison:
The only difference is that the word "powers" has been replaced by "deities" in a few places.
Over there:
The powers are harsh with their priests and their people, demanding unswerving obedience under threat of punishment. But of late, they've fallen out of mortal favor. 'Course, part of the reason could be because they're so strict, but it's doubtful the Babylonian gods would admit it, much less change their ways.[...]
On here:
The deities are harsh with their priests and their people, demanding unswerving obedience under threat of punishment. But of late, they've fallen out of mortal favor. 'Course, part of the reason could be because they're so strict, but it's doubtful the Babylonian gods would admit it, much less change their ways.
I am certain the same holds true for most of the other entries on that page, and on the Dungeons And Dragons Real World Deities G To Z and Dungeons And Dragons Literary Deities pages as well. (The latter has plenty of other issues on its own, but we won't get into those here)
The Danse Macabre Codex
Space Molly Weasley
It Takes a Village's very short description is copy-pasted from its FF.net page. Will remove it shortly.
EDIT: A bit late, but done.
Edited by TroperNo9001 on Jan 3rd 2024 at 11:01:11 PM
"Anemone dear, I know you want to be more independent from me, but... please take care, okay?"
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
A large number of the Recap.Henry Danger pages have copypasted descriptions. The troper seems to have stopped doing that after I sent a notifier for one, but the old ones still remain up.
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
he/him
It's been pointed out that some, possibly all, of the Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg character bios are directly copied from the in-game text (available on github here).
I've searched for a few phrases and, although finding the right file can be tricky, it seems to be true.
For example, Kaiserreich Eastern Europe has August IV as its first character on the page - and the bio is lifted directly from POL_august_iv_desc in the Github Poland (POL) folder.
The game has a lot of characters. This looks as if it could be a fairly big job to clean up.
I mainly fix indentation issues
The description of I'm Not A Regression appears to be a translated copy of the original summary. We can see its use in other sites such as here.
This troper readded a description to this page after I deleted it orginally for being a straight lifting from the AO 3 website. The current one they put back is still way too close to the official one on the website, at least to me.
the Retromancer
I've sent the user a plagiarism notifier, and they kinda rewrote it like this. Is this sufficient?
The plot description for Spectreman is lifted directly from the wikipedia page on the show with some minor modifications and omissions.
Anime Guy
The entire Saved from Development Hell section of Green Lantern (2011)’s Trivia page is copy-pasted wholesale from Wikipedia. Not to mention the entry was posted by Amuck Cricetine, who has a history of plagiarism elsewhere on the site.
An example of the plagiarism:
From Wikipedia:
From TV Tropes:
Musician/Composer
On the description for the Anime.Blue Seed page, the following paragraph is very similar to the one from Wikipedia:
There is also a three episode OVA, Blue Seed Beyond (also known as Blue Seed 2), which takes place two years after the end of the TV series. It concerns what seems to be a resurgence of aragami (actually created via biotechnology), and introduces a new character, Valencia Tachibana. Like Kusanagi, she was implanted with a mitama without turning into a full aragami.
Do you think we should rewrite it or remove it?
Edited by gjjones on Mar 3rd 2024 at 8:17:07 AM
He/His/Him. No matter who you are, always Be Yourself.
the Retromancer
Recap.Ghosts US appears to have a chronic problem of copying official synopsis by multiple tropers.
TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup
Space Molly Weasley
The Murder of Lila Rossi has its summary copypasted from its AO3 page. Gonna zap it and send the page creator the notifier.
EDIT: Done.
Edited by TroperNo9001 on Mar 23rd 2024 at 4:43:25 PM
"Anemone dear, I know you want to be more independent from me, but... please take care, okay?"
My bad. I didn't know that was a no-no. Will fix that immediately.
"We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist."
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/149050/a-new-world-a-new-way has basically the same description as Fanfic.A New World A New Way.
Uzume's back baby!
The descriptions for the newly-launched pages for Ferdy The Ant and Bruno And The Banana Bunch were taken from their Wikipedia articles.
- Wikipedia
Ferdy the Ant (also simply referred to as Ferdy and Ferda) is a 1984 German-British children's animated television series based on the Ferda Mravenec series of picture books by Czech author Ondřej Sekora.[1] The animation was handled by Far Eastern Productions.
The series revolves around a little boy-ant named Ferdy as he embarks on a variety of adventures in the insect Utopia of Käfertal with his close insect friends.[2]
- TV Tropes
Ferdy the Ant (also simply referred to as Ferdy and Ferda) is a 1984 German-British children's animated television series based on the Ferda Mravenec series of picture books by Czech author Ondřej Sekora.
The animation was handled by Far Eastern Productions.
Plot: The series revolves around a little ant boy named Ferdy who embarks on a variety of adventures in the Käfertal insect society with his insect friends.
Captain Cryptic
Several descriptions for pages indexed on Recap.Sonic Boom, specifically those added by missgrace2020, have the majority of their text lifted verbatim from the episodes' plot summaries on Sonic Wiki Zone.
(Not bothering with a ping, as they last edited the wiki in 2022)
"My job here is done." "But you didn't do anything."
As brought up by this ATT query
.
Nic Master Trope has been replacing the troper-made summaries on the S1 and S3 Recap.Hilda with the "real" episode summaries, which appear to be copy and pasted from the show's Netflix page.
Likewise, the descriptions on the S2 pages are also copy and pasted from the show's Netflix page, though they've been around longer and are not caused by Nic Master Trope, but by MissRoboto back in 2020.
Edited by Tylerbear12 on Dec 9th 2023 at 3:56:02 AM