The Copy-Paste Cleanup Thread

Peter Sarstedt is directly plagiarized from Wikipedia. Paging ~Ladyofpayne as they created the article.

I am about to fix that. Please remove this note.

And now it's full of spelling and grammar problems. Trading one kind of cleanup for another doesn't really win points here.

I strongly suggest visiting the English help thread before making any more edits.

edited 7th Apr '17 8:25:23 AM by TotemicHero

Fixed. Please take a look.

Not sure if that was in response to me or just claiming you had finished your copy-paste "fix", but still tons of bad English grammar and misspellings all over the place. ~Fighteer, you may want to take action.

/sigh

Well, it's not plagiarized but now it's terribly written. I suppose we should cut it?

I'll run it by the work/creator description improvement thread, and see if they feel like doing anything. If they don't, then it can probably be cut.

Either way, it's outside this thread's scope now. Removing it from the list.

I am going through the wicks to Archive of Our Own for a different project, and noting that the "synopsis" section in Fan Fic Recs seems to have copy-pasted the information from the source frequently. I'm unsure to the admissibility of this so I'm suggesting a review.

You'll need to highlight more specific examples: there are a LOT of Fanfic Recs pages.

It's pretty common in general.

I think it's permitted since the fics are already being sourced with links, plus it's just the synopsis.

edited 22nd Apr '17 10:12:07 AM by Karxrida

I'm pretty sure that rec pages get used at times as impetuses for launching work pages for recommended fics. As such, I really don't want bad habits like copy-pasting carried over. If it's not acceptable on work pages, it shouldn't be acceptable on the rec pages.

If it's really that ubiquitous, that's a extremely bad sign. If we have to purge the majority of recommendations because of copy-pasted content, then it becomes a question of if it's worth keeping what's left - and whether or not the concept of fanfic rec pages needs to die. But that's not my call - and regardless, that call can't be made either way without more specific information about how prevalent the copy-pasting is. Hence why I asked for details.

It's only the synopsis (read: one to two sentences designed by the author to concisely summarize the work) being c/p'd, and it's akin to a page quote. The page also makes it clear that we do not claim ownership, links to the source are provided so it's effectively being cited, and people making the recs also tend to leave their own comments outside of that.

Besides, cross-referencing FF fics to see if the synopsis was copied would be a pain; ao3 fics have it displayed within the actual fic and on the master list, while FF only has it shown on the master list.

I think we need Word of Mod on this.

EDIT: We could always change them to say "to quote the official synopsis" so we don't have to ditch a bunch of recs or rewrite the synopses if it's an issue.

edited 22nd Apr '17 11:21:53 AM by Karxrida

I'd rather have it settled by consensus, but I don't think enough people visit this thread regularly to get that.

Sigh...paging ~Septimus Heap.

One or two sentences might be OK, but more than that is a no given copyright concerns.

Which brings right back around to needing more information on this. (I REALLY don't want to have to manually comb these pages, although it's likely someone will have to.)

Calling in ~crazysamaritan to come back and provide some additional info on what they were looking at.

I was checking on AO 3 wicks, and noticed that several cases of Archive of Our Own works had the claim that the entire synopsis was lifted from the (edit) publication page itself. So checking the Related To tab will find the examples that concerned me. After seeing it several times, I started to get the impression that several more might be quoting without the attribution.

edited 24th Apr '17 4:22:42 AM by crazysamaritan

First you said the problem was on the rec pages, and now you said it was on the work pages themselves, and in neither case you provided specific examples. Telling me to do investigative work that you've supposedly already done doesn't exactly put me in a good mood, you know.

I don't doubt both are correct - I've already found some copy-paste on the Naruto rec pages. I'd kind of like to know what the standard is supposed to be for the synopsis length on those pages, because copying one or two sentences may or may not work when that's the entire length of the synopsis.

As for specific fanfic pages themselves - well, I'm not going to comb through those wicks just yet, I don't have that much spare time. If you want them dealt with more quickly, you'll have to actually drop the names of specific pages.

From the Related To tab

• FanficRecs.Attack On Titan
  • The 6th Ward
• FanficRecs.Avas Demon
  • None
• FanficRecs.Back To The Future
  • None
• FanficRecs.Big Hero 6
  • None
• FanficRecs.Captain America The Winter Soldier
  • lonely houses off the road
• FanFicRecs.Danny Phantom
  • None
• FanficRecs.Detective Conan
  • (Unclear) Forget Me Nots
  • (Unclear) Black Feather
  • (Unclear) We're Sorry
  • (Unclear) Heavy Silences
• FanficRecs.Digimon
  • Digimon Frontier Rebirth
  • Dreaming To Reality: 02 Remix
  • Tamers—The Colony
  • Manzanar
  • Digimon Genesis
  • Don't fall asleep
  • Anniversary
  • The Digimon Apocalypse Trilogy
  • The Destiny of Tenacity
  • (Unclear) The Song of Love
  • (Unclear) Bitter Like Regret
• FanficRecs.Fate Stay Night
  • (Unclear) Crosswinds Of Fate
  • (Unclear) Fictional
  • Fate/Reach Out
• FanficRecs.Frozen
  • MRA Trilogy
  • (Unclear) Sweet Joy Befall Thee
  • (Unclear) Ghost on the Wire
  • (Unclear) A Snowflake In Spring

Footnote Fever has some examples' text copypasted from Wikipedia (and openly says so at the bottom of the page). I've found one so far, but I don't have time to comb the page to check for others.

It's on the list.

All the description's for playable characters on the Injustice 2 sheets are lifted directly from the Injustice 2 website. I'm going to try and fix some of them, but some help would be appreciated.

While working on a general expansion of the Warhammer: Age of Sigmar Character page, I have noticed that a number of the recent edits (the past month or two) by the troper htd appear to have been copy/pasted from the Games Workshop website, something I believe they have got into trouble over previously. I will continue to rewrite them as and when I find them but I was wondering if the information being freely available was a mitigating factor for the copy/paste issue?

Literature.Reaper and the other works of that guy, have their descriptions ripped from the Wordpress.

~MaLady, you don't exactly look good yourself for making the Overwatch as a stub page without fleshing it out.

However, the troper Marrow looks far worse, since this led me to note that they had a long history of doing this with various online books (before dropping off the site completely in 2015, hence why I'm not paging them). They may also have edited under the name of exenseriors - they have the same basic style, despite the latter only having a handful of edits in 2016, centered on one of the books you're referring to.

Going to have to call in ~Septimus Heap here to confirm if these two are the same person, and if there might be other sockpuppet accounts doing the same thing. I'll start throwing up these pages on the list a little later, once I have time to look through his history more thoroughly (and finding out if there are any more edit histories to look through).

Well, That Overwatch page would have been a blue link anyway, 'cause Overwatch is a thing that exists.

Else, I wouldn't have done anything other than having all of those pages link to each other, except for Red Overwatch, which would have clearly indicated that it was looking for info 'cause it would have been red.

But, I won't do the same for other pages in the same circumstances, then?

edited 18th Jun '17 6:24:14 PM by Malady

No direct overlap between Marrow and the other troper, can't check easily indirect on this device.