Have a question about how the TVTropes wiki works? No one knows this community better than the people in it, so ask away! Ask the Tropers is the page you come to when you have a question burning in your brain and the support pages didn't help.
It's not for everything, though. For a list of all the resources for your questions, click here. You can also go to this Directory thread
for ongoing cleanup projects.
First obvious question. Are you the same person as Scrooge Mac Duck, an admin of the Tardis Wiki? Your editing history here starts around the same time Scrooge's ended.
(It seems unlikely, because Scrooge is French and you appear to be Canadian, but there's a potential conflict of interest so I have to ask.)
I had a dog-themed avatar before it was cool.
Oh no, I had no idea about Scrooge. I’m not even signed up on Fandom. It’s an interesting coincidence though. And sorry I didn’t clarify it’s not all the pages, just a few examples from each page.
Edited by CanuckMcDuck1 Everybody loves the me! I’m a great athlete!
Do we know which page was created first? Because we have alot of overlap with editors on Who wikis and the other wiki, if they wrote our pages, they probably had a major hand in writing other wikis. We've had a case before where checking the time stamps revealed it was The Other Wiki that appeared to have cribbed from us, via a regular editor who contributed to both. When it comes to fan stuff like this, we need to make sure the duplication is from them to us, not from us to them.
^ Both Wikipedia and Fandom have a detailed edit history, but OP would have to be more specific than "some examples".
Also to answer the question, as stated above, if something appeared elsewhere first and copied here, it needs to be removed and the troper who've added it reminded about About Images and Copyright.
TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup
I believe that all the examples of plagiarism on the Doctor Who trivia pages originate from a Troper who went by the names of Cumbersome Tercel, Clint Eastwood, William Shakesman and Amuck Cricetine, who edited between 2016 and 2022 under those names.
You can see past discussions of their plagiarism and ban-evading by using different names here
and here. It covers a lot of different franchises.
I have removed many examples of plagiarism from them over time; whenever I see an entry that looks suspiciously un-TV Tropes-like in tone, I do a Google search for the text, and more often than not it turns out to have been plagiarized from Wikipedia, Shannon Sullivan's Doctor Who site or somewhere else, and it is invariably this Troper who added it under one of those four names.
It's not just Doctor Who where I've found plagiarism from them, just a couple of weeks ago I found that they had plagiarized Wikipedia on an episode of The Prisoner, and what originally alerted me to their plagiarism (prompting me to search Ask The Tropers for William Shakesman and discover that they'd been banned for serial plagiarism) was an episode of Sherlock where they forgot to remove the source numbers when plagiarizing Wikipedia...
But I have only ever found their plagiarism by stumbling across it, it doesn't appear that anyone has ever attempted a systematic clean-up of it until now.
There probably needs to be a thorough check of all the pages they edited, going through the edit history of all four of their usernames.
Edited by offa
I had no idea that there was such a large history from a few accounts.
^^For Amonimus, I don’t think the troper who added the plagiarized examples is active anymore. I previously mentioned this on the Copy Paste cleanup thread. I’ll provide an example edited into the main query.
Once plagiarism is found (TVT content cribbing from other websites), it can be cut wholesale. It's not on you to rewrite, but you can do that if you'd like. For a cleanup project too large for the copy-paste thread, you may create a short-term project for easier management.
That might help as an archive of this plagiarism. But I’d be mostly focusing on the Doctor Who plagiarism, and not the serial stealing that Offa mentioned above. Would a short-term project attract any attention from other Tropers?
Edited by CanuckMcDuck1 Everybody loves the me! I’m a great athlete!
I’m doing a plagiarism clean-up of Doctor Who’s trivia pages. I got tipped off a while ago that almost every page of the first Three doctors’ pages has examples (mostly under What Could Have Been) that have been plagiarized from either the show’s wiki or this comprehensive website
(which the wiki itself has cribbed from).
For example, several trivia examples from the episode “An Unearthly Child” (the very 1st episode of the series) had been plagiarized from it’s wiki article’s story notes.
And while doing cleanup the trivia page for the episode “The Romans”
and it is seeping with plagiarism, up to and including Wikipedia.
So how should I go forward with this? I’ve been editing previous pages to remove plagiarism, but this particular page is compromised with it.
Edited by CanuckMcDuck1