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Can you give us some examples?
The template on the main Fanfic Recs page clearly states "Give a synopsis, whether it's yours or the one the fic gives." So if it's not allowed, that needs to be edited. (And then thousands of recommendations that followed its advice.)
Trouble Cube continues to be a general-purpose forum for those who desire such a thing.
Almost if not all synopsises on FanficRecs.Steven Universe, FanficRecs.Total Drama, and FanficRecs.Undertale are taken directly from their respective fics, just to name a few. For instance:
Rec summary for To Build A Tower, You First Need Materials (The ocean is a good material)
:
Actual fic summary:
Rec summary for Candy for Your Thoughts?:
Actual fic summary:
Rec summary for social links:
Actual fic summary:
I see that as a Necessary Weasel since the first thing you'd seen FOR a fic is the summary. And the template does say you can use the one the fic gives, so many people just use that unless the summary doesn't really tell anything about the fic, in which case they add onto it or make an original one if there is no summary at all, such as a webcomic or a fan-script.
I was under the impression the no-copy-paste rule was more like 'Don't copy the entire trope description from a wikipedia page' or 'don't copy-paste the tearjerker page to a heartwarming page.'
Otherwise pretty much all of the Quotes would have to be excised because a majority of quotes are taken from works.
Edited by lalalei2001 The Protomen enhanced my life.
Quoting a summary on another website might be fine if the quote is clearly marked as such and the actual origin of the quoted text stated, but of the fanfic rec pages I inspected none seems to do this. So the summaries in their form are plagiarism.
Copyright is another issue, too.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Should we put quotes around them to indicate they came from the fanfic page?
Here's the relevant Cleanup thread, which mainly focuses on text copies from wikis or wikipedia. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=14727740310A09919300&page=7
I don't see how the copied summaries are plagiarism — they're done by the writers to advertise their fic, after all. Fanfic isn't copyrightable (since it's already a grey area legally ), nor do any of the fanfic sites I know of copyright the stories for their site. The writers shouldn't have an issue with us using their summaries to recommend it to other readers and give them free promo.
I mean, I'd much rather have a troper use one of my fic summaries, rather than attempt their own and mangle what the story's about. A lot of folks aren't good at summing up stories, after all (which is a fanfic trope itself!). And like the others have said, Septimius — the template itself states it's ok to do so, and it's said that for a few years, at least. I'm betting that the majority of fanfic recs here use a copied summary. So either every fanfic rec on this site has to be checked and redone or deleted...or we just let things go on as they've been because it's not an issue.
Copying a wikipedia page? Yeah, that's plagiarism. Using a fanfic writer's summary for its intended purpose of drawing in readers and advertising the tale? Not so much.
Edited by FranksGirl
I had noticed the copyright fanfic thing too. A lot of fanfics are posted with disclaimers saying the writer doesn't own [x]. If someone recommended one of my fics and used the story's summary I'd be fine with that XD
The Protomen enhanced my life.
^^ Plagiarism isn't an issue of copyright. Plagiarism is presenting someone else's work as your own. By never specifying whether or not we've just pasted the author's summary, we are implicitly claiming that pasted summaries are equivalent to those we did write on our own.
Of course we never intend to claim that it's our own work, but it's still bad to make it insufficiently clear that it isn't.
Trouble Cube continues to be a general-purpose forum for those who desire such a thing.
Personally I'd change the template to include an "Author's Summary" field, and specify that "Synopsis" is meant to be our doing, and optional if the author's summary gets the point across.
Trouble Cube continues to be a general-purpose forum for those who desire such a thing.
^^Wingedcatgirl, maybe that's the implication you get, but not me. I always assumed that the summary was the fic writer's, since it's their story.
Look, if you take an ad for Budweiser and somehow edit it so that your beer is named/shown in the ad instead, then yeah, you have a case for plagiarism — you're taking someone's work for your own use, and the Bud lawyers'll be all your butt. However, if you leave the ad as-is with Budweiser intact and air the ad in full ...say, on You Tube...Bud'll ignore you. You're giving them free ad space and free promo. They won't complain.
Ditto the summaries. If I took a writer's summary and used it for my own work, yeah, that writer would have every right to be pissed. But if I take that summary as-is to promo the writer's story? Which is what the summary is SUPPOSED to be used for, to advertise that story and bring in readers? Free promo & no writer would complain — and I doubt any of them have.
We're making a mountain out of a non-issue molehill.
I always assumed that the synopsis was written by the troper who made the recommendation, because that's what I would do.
Trouble Cube continues to be a general-purpose forum for those who desire such a thing.
Your or my assumption of who wrote the summary is not the issue.
The issue is using the writer's summary. A lot of folks suck at summaries. They use the writer's summary, and then direct readers to the originating site: both writer and fic site get the traffic and benefit. We're giving the writers free promo for their tales and encouraging people to read their stories on the original site. Writers like readers. Sites like visitors. They both like publicity. We're using the summaries to do exactly what the writer wants to do: draw people in to read the story. There's a concept in law about if you're not hurt by an action, if you actually gain benefits from said action, then you don't have a complaint or a case. That's what's in play here.
It's no different than a movie reviewer using the movie trailer in her review.
Also, there's hundreds (thousands?) of fanfic recs on this site. Are we seriously going to devote limited resources to checking each and every rec, and remove the "copied summary" ones, especially when the template/rules page stated it's ok to copy those? That's making a lot of work for TVT over something that's a non-issue...especially something that has not been an issue for years now.
Edited by FranksGirl
Er, plagiarism and copyright infringement is actually a serious issue.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
We don't copy Wikipedia's summary of the work, why? Because they're an original synopsis. Why doesn't Wikipedia use the author's summary? Because that would be plagerism. If you properly source the summary, it isn't plagerism anymore. Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
The way to avoid accusations of plagiarism is to cite the source. If the synopsis of a recommended fic is copied from the author's own synopsis, then it should be explicitly stated.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
How about adding something like this to all the fanfic rec pages?
Bump?
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Crossover-Enthusiast, your suggestion isn't any different than saying we should mark the copied text as from the fic summary, because we would have to mark all the non-copied text as original.
I'd suggest making a general disclaimer that can be copy-pasted into note markup and putting the copy-able version on the Fanfic Recommendations page. Something like "This summary originates from the author(s) of the recommended fanfic." We have a dedicated plagiarism thread already, which could act as a hub for this project, imo.
Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty
Right, so there's an obvious "don't just copy-paste" rule when creating works pages, as it's considered a form a plagiarism. However, all the Fanfic Recs pages I've come across have the synopsis carried over verbatim. Is that allowed?