The Copy-Paste Cleanup Thread

United Passions really needs a trip to the complaining thread too.

MadMaze has a comment indicating its description was stolen from Wikipedia.

Kidsongs description is the same as wikipedia

KelanFarron is copying the SVU episode recaps from the recaps used in Wikipedia and others

They are doing it for heaps of Bones and other shows as well

The second Five-Second Foreshadowing entry on Toy Story 2 is the same as an entry on IMDb's trivia page for the movie. But since that entry includes "Armor-Piercing Question" complete with capitalization, I believe they copied it from us rather than the other way around.

The incredibly short work page description for Kaboom! is taken from Wikipedia.

We've got a few light novel pages whose apparently copied descriptions need to be rewritten.

Steal the Stars's first paragraph is taken from the official description.

On both the trope and work pages, the Hollywood Law examples from Bee Movie are taken from LegalEagle's linked video. Is it really necessary to separately list every requirement for a class action lawsuit? The part about Barry suing humanity should probably go too, since in the actual trial he just sues five honey manufacturers.

Fanfic.The Abalone Funeral Dirge:

Multiple "The Author's Summary:"

The bulk of the description of Varney the Vampire is ripped from Wikipedia.

Several Paul Féval works have their descriptions copy-pasted from the publisher's promotional material:

• John Devil (from here)
• Knightshade (from here)
• Gentlemen of the Night (from here)
• The Vampire Countess (from here)

MithrandirOlorin

So I'm not 100 percent sure this is the right place, but I noticed that both Franchise Killer and the Television Networks subpage for Dork Age have a completely identical block of text (buried in a note for the latter) describing the downfall of NBC's "Must See TV" block of Thursday night television. I haven't checked the histories to see if both versions were added by the same troper, but this makes me immediately suspicious that it's taken from somewhere else.

(FWIW it might be a moot point, because I'm not sure a block of TV shows even belongs on Franchise Killer in the first place.)

The character descriptions on Characters.Caillou are taken directly from the official website.

Most or all of Action Taimanin and its subpages was plagiarized from the AllTheTropes wiki by its writer, who is now bounced for being a colossal dick. Apparently these things are related. I'm not sure if it's salvageable without being cut.

Any edits that were ripped off that I personally wrote I'm willing to re-release to TV Tropes under CC BY NC SA so that can avoided if need be. Some of them were mine, but I cannot speak for anyone else who had their work infringed, but if doing so for my own edits means you guys can keep most of the page content, I'm willing to let it slide and allow my work to be used here under CC BY NC SA.

Well, we don't want to encourage this sort of thing. Normally we'd get the article's writer here, but they got banned, so someone has to take on the task of rewriting those examples from scratch. If we can't get anyone, we can cut the pages and let someone do them properly.

That's understandable. So long as this matter is settled to prevent any issues between our sites, I shall leave myself content with that and am grateful this is being addressed.

Since no cleanup effort has been made, I have cutlisted Action Taimanin and subpages.

The description of Jade City is verbatim from the blurb.

Just found this page. Didn't know that cleanup was being requested for the Action Taimanin pages, or that the other major guy who was editing them alongside me was bounced for being a colossal dick. I would've at least liked to hear about it on the Discussion first.

I won't pretend I didn't look to that other wiki for some inspiration, but I will protest that I wrote a lot of content for both from scratch, and that I was the one who wrote some of the stuff for the All The Tropes page that I then copy-pasted here. I didn't think, given the two sites have similar terminology and a similar origin, that that was a big deal. Heck, I copy-paste stuff from one part of this site to another somewhat-regularly, such as when I'm writing an example of a work on a trope page or vice-versa.

If it's a problem, I guess I can look over every single bit that I didn't personally write, copy-pasted from my work on another site or not and re-write it... just don't want what represents a decent chunk of time-investment on my end to go right down the drain, you know?

...Also, because I'm a sad-sack, I just spent $45 of my own money to buy a character's launch pack at least partly so I could write a better article for her and now it looks like that was also a waste.

Wrote an Ask The Tropers before setting Search to Date instead of Relevance and finding this. Sorry about that.

Edited by wingedcatgirl on Nov 6th 2020 at 12:05:47 PM

I think you might want to add Punishing: Gray Raven to the list. Compare the trope list to this wikia homepage. Both pages were edited by the same person, Person With Many Aliases (changed their wikia name to DasGefrorene)

The issue is the copyright license. TV Tropes now uses CC BY NC SA, All The Tropes use CC BY SA. You can of course, according to Creative Common rules, submit to either site under what license you wish, but to avoid confusion as to whether your edits were legit or not, you should specify something about how you wrote it on one site and resubmitting it elsewhere as well in edit reasons, that would leave a clear record you did not plagiarize.

Thing is, you can only submit what you wrote yourself if it came from a site with a different license, not the work of others, which is why no one can use content from Wikipedia here unless they originally wrote it themselves (they also use CC BY SA).

From what I could tell, most of the infringing edits were done by the banned editor, not you, but worth keeping the above in mind to avoid issues in the future.

Also, legally speaking, All The Tropes forked from this site in July 2012, after which the license for TV Tropes changed to CC BY NC SA, and the fork uses all content that was in existence when it still used CC BY SA and still uses that license for all content since.

I appreciate the detail and clarity of your response. Thank you.