User talk:Russavia/Archive 30

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Copyright violations from Encyclopædia Britannica

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

This can be closed off now that the revisions in question have now been revdelled Russavia (talk) 05:12, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

WP article	Date and diff copyvio introduced	EB article	Diffchecker	Date copyvio removed	Time copyvio in article	Date copyvio revdelled	Notes
Émile Durkheim	14 June 2009 [1]	[2]	[3]	10 April 2014 [4]	1761 days	Not done	* The copyright violation was introduced by M3taphysical (talk · contribs) The copyright violation was first brought up for discussion on 21 April 2010 The article underwent a GA review in June 2011 and was conducted and passed by Tom Morris (talk · contribs). The issue of copyright violation has since been brought up several times on the talk page, and has been ignored, and edit warred over on the article itself The copyright violation was brought to my attention on 9 April 2014 I raised the issue with Tom Morris in public on IRC. He said would look at it, but was at work at that time. I raised the issue on IRC on #wikipedia-en. GorillaWarfare (talk · contribs) removed the "plagiarism" When I explained to GorillaWarfare that copyright violations should be revdelled, and mentioned that copyright violations affect the ability to redistribute our content, in no small part due to any revision being able to re-used, she stated she would not be revdelling at this time. I re-asked Tom Morris (talk · contribs) to look at it 24 hours later. This request was ignored. The article is still rated as GA, and the copyright violation is still in the article history. Revdel requested on 27 April 2014 by Psychonaut (talk · contribs) Sent email to legal@wikimedia.org on 5 May 2014 to inform them of this issue. No response as of 13 May 2014. Contacted EB on 13 May 2014 to inform them of this copyright violation, and the community's seemingly refusal to deal with it appropriately.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Russavia (talk • contribs)

Are you trying to be disruptive, or are you just clueless? Please stop drama mongering. If you perceive a problem but others don't agree, you have to accept that sometimes you won't get your way. Making threats of this nature is not helpful at all. Jehochman ^Talk 13:26, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

Don't we normally rev-del copyright violations in article history when they're pointed out. Maggie? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 06:24, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Sometimes, Anthonyhcole, but it's highly dependent on what admin sees it and the circumstances. I myself try to rev delete when the content is large and restoration (inadvertent or otherwise) seems likely, but there's always a balance with transparency when the copyvio has been in history for a while. There is currently no policy that requires such deletion. Coincidentally, legal is working on a WikiLegal statement related to the question of copyright problems in article histories, meta:Wikilegal/Copyright Status of Wikipedia Page Histories. I don't believe it is 100% complete. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 13:27, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

@Moonriddengirl: thank you for advising of this. I will keep tabs on how this progresses, and I may post on the talk page. Whilst I understand that Legal will opine from the point of view of US law, and will comment almost entirely on how it directly affects the WMF as the host of such materials, one thing it likely will not touch on is the ethical considerations that projects need to consider, and of course this goes for all projects, whether that be English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource, etc. Instead of calling it meta:Wikilegal/Copyright Status of Wikipedia Page Histories perhaps Legal could rename it to meta:Wikilegal/Copyright Status of Wikimedia project Page Histories so that it applies as Legal advice as it pertains to protection of the WMF across all of our projects, not just Wikipedia. Essentially what I see it being said at the end is that the WMF is just the host, will comply with valid DMCA notices, that US law needs to be followed, and that editors are legally responsible for their edits.

But Maggie, in relation to your comment on obtaining a balance with transparency, couldn't a solution to this across all projects be similar to this example on Commons. Revdel the text of the page history, but leave the edit summary and the editor name as is. The article above might be seen as quite an extreme example in some regards, especially as the copyright violation was in the article for going on five years, but in your position as an editor would the following be best practice:

Remove the copyright violation and before saving keep a copy of the article minus the copyright violation
Revdel the article text but not the edit summary or the editor (this is especially important due to licencing requirements
After revdelling, replace the current version of the text with the copy that was saved (minus the copyright violation) and simply use a link to the article history as the edit summary (which is sufficient to comply with the attribution requirements that we agree to when we edit) and perhaps mention it is text from revision XXX to YYY minus copyvio.

That way the 5 year history of the article is not completely lost (only the copyright violation is) and the transparency is still kept. The only issue then would be is there more copyright violations in the article that if the admin dealing with it would then be responsible for (as per the section already on Meta). Is this something as an editor you could broadly agree with?

As noted at Wikipedia:Copyright violations copyright violations not only harm Wikipedia's redistributability, but also create legal issues. and we often forget that our content is CC licenced specifically so it can be redistributed, even for profit, and that as a project (the entire WMF-hosted projects) we have an ethical obligation to the re-users of our content to make sure that we hold ourselves to the highest possible editorial standards and follow the same best practices that those we aim to emulate and surpass. We also need to recognise that not all of our re-users are in the United States, and many countries to do not have the extensive fair use laws that the US has, and that we want to re-users to safely redistribute our content, particularly in the Global South; where I am aware of in the past people distributing CDs with Wikipedia content on the streets for a nominal charge, but which still makes it commercial usage, and which could cause problems for the very people we want to redistribute our content.

This is obviously something that isn't really recognised widely here on Wikipedia, due to the endgame being about pageviews on the project, whereas on Commons it is about actively encouraging the content to be re-used on WMF projects, and elsewhere both online and offline. So I hope you understand my good faith concerns here and why I have raised them. Russavia (talk) 10:18, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

Transparency isn't only about usernames, however. Transparency is about being able to see who added what, when. When content is rev-deleted, the history of an article is no longer searchable for that. Therein lies the primary objection I've seen to using rev deletion on older copyright issues, and I have encountered this objection when using rev deletion myself. This is an old, old discussion on Wikipedia - it predates my participation by many years. See Wikipedia talk:Copyright violations on history pages. The fact that page histories may contain content that is not compatibly licensed is noted at MediaWiki:History copyright and discussed at Help:Page history. I'm afraid that to change this practice would probably require a pretty major discussion on Wikipedia. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 12:13, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

This might be a different situation if the problematic content represented most of the article, or if it were present in only a small number of revisions. Here, however, it represents a small portion of the article and the request is that we delete hundreds of revisions (with their associated attributions). It is perfectly reasonable not to do so, and I question Russavia's good faith in pressing this issue in the way that he has. Newyorkbrad (talk) 13:59, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

When an editor is indefinitely blocked and has a history of being blocked, if we can't assume his good faith even on his talk page posts, then it is time to block his access to his own talk page. There is actually no loss of communication involved in this additional block, Russavia can post to his heart's content on his Commons talk page, and if he says anything worth saying, Wikipedia editors can be directed there by his more sympathetic peers. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:04, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Closing off yet again. Newyorkbrad, on a personal note. This is not the first time I have contacted a copyright holder over copyright issues, but I certainly hope it is the last. You may only look at issues from the standpoint of the WMF, but others, as demonstrated by Nick's comments which certainly mirror mine and many other editors as well. If you decide to assume good faith or not, that's up to you. But I will ask that so long as you continue coming here and engaging in bad faith commentary about myself, that you kindly stay away from my talk page, and certainly don't reopen discussions when it was clear the issue was over as far as I am concerned. It is now pretty obvious that there are other issues which this project needs to look at -- my talk page is not the place for it -- I hope to be able to contribute to such discussions sometime in the future. Russavia (talk) 18:09, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Note: This could have been closed off even without the revision deletions, which I am not sure I agree with. Your conduct in contacting EB over this matter was trollish, disruptive, and unacceptable; see my comment on the ANI thread about your unblock request. Newyorkbrad (talk) 15:26, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Newyorkbrad - the continued presence of this material presents a significant legal risk to reusers of our material. There's absolutely no reason not to partially delete each revision that contains copyright text. We should be removing the article text, to make it inaccessible to reusers, but retaining the contributor's details and if appropriate, the edit summary. That strikes the best blend of fulfilling our moral obligations to reusers, to protect them as far as is possible, whilst allowing some degree of transparency, in showing who edited the article. I'm of course open to a more nuanced legal opinion (or anything at all you're able to say on this matter) that might guide how we should deal with such copyright violations in future. Nick (talk) 15:49, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Nick - see the comments by Moonriddengirl, who is probably our most knowledgeable user on these issues, above, and especially the discussion she links to for more information on this point. I would agree that if much of an article were copyvio, the revisions need to be deleted. I'm less convinced that if the copyvio relates to a small snippet of a longer article, and persists through dozens or hundreds of revisions, that still makes sense. The trade-off is between purging the copyright violations and impairing the attribution history, the preservation of which is also important. In any case, this wasn't such an egregious situation that making contact with EB was justifiable (as I said, see my comment on the ANI thread.) Newyorkbrad (talk) 16:03, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Interesting, though it seems to be somewhat at odds with a similar discussion we're having at the involuntary celibacy RfD. There was an AfD that called for a merger of material to another article. That material was added, and "involuntary celibacy" became a redirect. A consensus at the target article decided to remove the material, but now there are several there who opine that either the material must be rev-deleted from the target article's history or the redirect be preserved to satisfy the GFDL concerns. Why is it that we can leave actual copyvios in an article's revision history here, but over there, merged-then-unmerged text must be excised? Tarc (talk) 16:43, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

I don't know. Newyorkbrad (talk) 16:56, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

I honestly don't feel comfortable with that, Newyorkbrad. I don't feel we're being cautious enough on behalf of our downstream reusers. I believe we should be acting on a precautionary basis and removing at the very minimum the revisions of each page which we know contains copyrighted text.

If we aren't going to do that, we should at the very least be screaming at people looking at old versions of our content that there could be significant legal problems if they use an old version of any article. That's not what we do, however, for all manner of typical Wikipedia type reasons.

The document Maggie linked to above on Meta has, as its introduction to the first paragraph Previous versions of articles on Wikipedia may be viewed in page histories by clicking the current article’s “View history” tab. These historical versions of articles may contain copyrighted content, and therefore may constitute copyright infringement. but when I click on an old version of any article, I get this warning in a pink box This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Spartaz (talk | contribs | block) at 2014-06-11T17:15:12. It may differ significantly from the current revision.. It does, in turn, link to Help:Page history which, way down at the bottom (and in need of a scroll for most users) says As noted at the end of each history revision, in the text at MediaWiki:history copyright, the page histories may contain material that is subject to copyright limitations. While we attempt to remove such material from the current version (see copyright problems) it is often kept in the history for research and author attribution purposes. As Wikimedia is a not-for-profit company, this is believed to be fair use.

That's probably OK, but the text at Help:Page history is now woefully out of date, and there's now no link to MediaWiki:history copyright at the end of each history revision and I don't believe there has been for 5 years now (we believe it was changed in 2009). I know this is rapidly morphing into a couple of different issues, but if we're not going to remove problematic text, we need to make sure reusers are given as much warning as possible, and we're not doing that correctly either. Nick (talk) 16:58, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

My view is that we should focus more on actual, active copyright issues and less on what I might describe as purely theoretical ones. That being said, your perspective on this is important, and I hope you'll share it in the review that Moonriddengirl mentions. I still feel strongly that nothing in this situation warranted a contact with Encyclopedia Britannica. Newyorkbrad (talk) 17:01, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Message for Stefan2

@Stefan2: you have nominated File:Trooper Donaldson being awarded VC fair use claimed.jpg for deletion for this reason. You may notice above that I have listed both that image and File:Mark Donaldson VC 19-01-2009 fair use claimed.jpg as no longer complying with the NFCC. But truth be known, they never complied with the NFCC in the first place. The rationales used for both images are quite disingenuous.

The rationale for File:Trooper_Donaldson_being_awarded_VC_fair_use_claimed.jpg claims "This image depicts a historically significant ceremony. It is extremely unlikely that any free images of the event will ever become available as the ceremony took place within Government House and was probably attended by special forces personnel whose identity is protected." Looking at the claim, I can say:

Free images will become available, as all works will fall out of copyright at some stage in the future.
If usage is really required now, it is possible to contact copyright holders and ask for a release under a free licence. This does not seem to have been done. There is no evidence this was done.
The "identity is protected" claim is bunk, given this photo does not include people who's identity may be protected.

And finally, above I have listed this video from the event which is not only available under a free licence, but which also disproves the claims made in the actual rationale. So that photo should probably never have been uploaded without certain steps being taken first -- WP:NFCC is not carte blanche for editorial laziness.

The rationale for File:Mark Donaldson VC 19-01-2009 fair use claimed.jpg claims "As this image depicts a serving member of the secretive Australian Special Air Service Regiment (SASR) wearing his full uniform and medals, including a Victoria Cross, it is highly unlikely that it will ever be possible to replace it with a free photo. In addition, the photo has considerable historical value as it is a formal portrait of the first person to be awarded the Victoria Cross for Australia showing the recipient wearing the medal and was taken shortly after he was awarded it." Looking at that claim, I can say:

Being a living person, it is possible for a free photograph to be obtained. Particularly as Donaldson as a recipient of the VC would be involved in public "duties" in the future.
There is no requirement for a photo of a living person to be in their uniform
As per the above image, there is no evidence of any attempts to obtain that particular photo under a free licence first.

And finally, in the same section above I have listed this photo of Donaldson, which is free. The existence of this photo under a free licence, like the above photo, also disproves the claims made in the rationale.

We also have this photo which is of Donaldson, his family, and high ranking politicians and military people.

Perhaps you can replace usage of the non-free images with the free images, and have them deleted because it seems that too many people are unwilling to be bygones be bygones and I may never officially be able to deal with these issues myself. Cheers, Russavia (talk) 07:35, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

I am not sure exactly how much WP:BLOCK#Edits by and on behalf of blocked editors allows me to do based on findings posted by you, so I have linked to this section from the deletion discussion instead of making the changes myself. --Stefan2 (talk) 21:40, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Darkness Shines (talk • contribs)

Unblock request

This user's unblock request has been reviewed by an administrator, who declined the request. Other administrators may also review this block, but should not override the decision without good reason (see the blocking policy).

Russavia (block log • active blocks • global blocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log))

Request reason:

I'd like to propose that the block on myself be lifted. I was blocked in June 2013, and the block was put up for community discussion, with an immediate consensus supporting the block. The reason for the block is that I had drafted an article that discussed Jimmy Wales in a way that offended him, and included supporting media (which I solicited) hosted on Wikimedia Commons.

The media was removed from English Wikipedia (but not Commons). I am not seeking to reopen the discussion about whether that content should be restored to Wikipedia, and since the block I have not pursued the issue in a disruptive manner. Rather, I have made valuable posts to my talk page, highlighting places in which unrelated Wikipedia content is out of compliance with our copyright policies.

I have consistently made high quality contributions to both Wikipedia and Commons, and whilst it is true that I have been involved in some controversies, the depth of my commitment to the vision of our projects is amply demonstrated by the majority of my contributions. This block should be lifted so I can continue to engage as a good faith member of our community. Thank you for your consideration. Russavia (talk) 16:07, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

Decline reason:

The ANI discussion has continued for about 4 days, and has begun to slow down - even though consensus appears to have been reached some time ago. There are, as in all cases, those who argue that leopards cannot change their spots, hence there should be no unblock. Still others argue that we're doing the project a disservice by keeping someone who has been a positive contributor in the past blocked. Others of course fill the spectrum in-between. This project as a whole does firmly believe that offenders can be saved, and give second (or even thirty-second) chances - WP:OFFER is proof of that. This project as a whole does AGF. The challenge is that it's a requirement for the person requesting unblock to both identify and acknowledge all of the behaviours that led to the block, and also to identify a way forward that convinces the reviewing admin (or in this case, the community) that there will be no recidivism. The majority of opposes - and indeed, a good number of the supports - have focussed on the fact that one or both of these requirements have not been properly met. In the case of someone with an extensive block log, this is often based on the concept of "trust" - in other words, "we trusted you once ... and you have let us down again and again ... and have not gone out of your way to prove otherwise this time". How does one regain trust? Usually, this is a combination of both time and behaviour - and with the unfortunate background of this specific this appears to require both extensive time, and impeccible behaviour elsewhere. It can be left to Russavia to determine what they feel is appropriate to meet both the "extensive" and "impeccible" elements, and they can therefore judge their next steps AND their next unblock request accordingly. In my review of the comments, this is (by majority of the discussion) not an infinite block the panda ɛˢˡ” 16:57, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

If you want to make any further unblock requests, please read the guide to appealing blocks first, then use the {{unblock}} template again. If you make too many unconvincing or disruptive unblock requests, you may be prevented from editing this page until your block has expired. Do not remove this unblock review while you are blocked.

I would like to voice my opposition to this unblock request. Administrators considering unblocking this user should please check the block log. It shows other recent (January 2014) concerns including announcing "an intention to sock" and "inappropriate use of user talk page while blocked". The block log also shows a substantial history of blocks on English Wikipedia. Administrators considering unblocking this user should reflect on whether the community should spend additional time debating blocking this user again in the future. Regardless of status on English Wikipedia, this user can continue making constructive contributions to the project through Wikimedia Commons. - tucoxn\^talk 00:06, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
I support unblocking. The dick painting of Jimbo was cosmic satire but also, in my opinion, trolling, and a lengthy block was appropriate. The message has now been sent and apparently received. I disagree with Russavia's stance at Commons, but that's Commons. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 01:24, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
Note: That controversial video was deleted from Commons and replaced with a neutral one. The painting itself is not much insulting as it can be considered as a humorous one. So sticking on that single matter as a block reason is not much meaningful. I don't know any other concerns related to this block though. J e e 02:03, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
I support the unblock request. If Russavia trolls too much again, he can be shown the door again. He is a contributing Wikipedian, however, and punishments should be rational responses to problematic actions, not hysterical anticipations of potential bad actions. Carrite (talk) 05:31, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
anyone seeking to unblock will need to put this up at ANI. FWIW the unblock reason is far from compelling and does not accurately reflect the level of trolling and harrassment that Russavia inflicted on the project. There is a total lack of contrition or acknowledgement of the harm they caused. I'm firmly opposed to unblock. Spartaz ^Humbug! 05:45, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Forwarded to ANI as suggested above. J e e 10:00, 9 June 2014 (UTC)