Talk:Tom Skinner

message: Rjanag had made serious allegations that Grutness, the primary author of this article, is a plagiarist and a liar. Grutness has now withdrawn in a distressed state from the project.  Rjanag has made it clear she is persisting with her allegations and will not engage in rational discussion. She offers, as her only alternative, reporting the issue elsewhere. As a preliminary to doing that, I am setting the plagiarism issue out below. 
Rjanag's accusations of "plagiarism" can be found here. Rjanag takes this version of the article and compares the following text with what is in this source:
:*Article: Skinner was heavily involved in many community organisations, among them the New Zealand Coastguard Service and the New Zealand Institute for the Blind.Source: Skinner was involved in several community organisations, including the New Zealand Coastguard Service, the New Zealand Institute for the Blind...
:*Article: He was actively involved in rugby league as both a referee and administrator, and was manager of the 1960 New Zealand national rugby league team's tour to Britain.Source: He was actively involved in rugby league as a referee and administrator, and was manager of the 1960 New Zealand rugby league team to Britain.
:*Article: In 1940, Skinner was elected secretary of the Auckland branch of the New Zealand Plumbers Union, and soon became involved in several other smaller unions...Source: In 1940 Skinner was elected secretary of the Auckland branch of the New Zealand Plumbers Union. He also became secretary of a number of other small unions in Auckland...
:*Article: He largely withdrew from public life after Molly’s death in 1985, and died in Auckland on 11 November 1991.Source: He largely withdrew from public life after Molly’s death in 1985 but continued his involvement with the St John Ambulance until 1989. Tom Skinner died in Auckland on 11 November 1991.
Looking at the first example, it is not plagiarism to include the title of an organisation. So we can remove the text referring to the "New Zealand Coastguard Service" and the "New Zealand Institute for the Blind". This leaves remaining, the matching phrase "community organisations".
Similarly, using job titles in relation to organisation names is not plagiarism, as in "secretary of the Auckland branch of the New Zealand Plumbers Union" and "manager of the 1960 New Zealand rugby league team". So following through on this basis, we are left overall with the following matching phrases:
 "community organisations", "He was actively involved in", "a referee and administrator, and was","In 1940, Skinner was elected", "He largely withdrew from public life after Molly’s death in 1985"
This is the total plagiarism by Grutness as found by Rjanag.
As a contrast, let's look at the featured article Not One Less. This includes text based on this source. Some of the matched phrases from the source are:
 "find work in the nearby city of zhangjiakou", "are still there when he returns", "to find work in the","from the festival and", "that the film was", "of not one less" 
This is a little less matching text than in the Grutness case, but then a smaller amount of text was involved. If the Grutness text was plagiarism, as Rjanag insists, then the featured article has been plagiarised as well. The plagiarised text was added by Rjanag.
Well of course, plagiarism was not involved in either article. What was involved in both articles was some close paraphrasing. But not according to Rjanag. --Epipelagic (talk) 10:27, 21 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Uh how can close paraphrasing be the primary problem in the Grutness case? Grutness has said that several of the lines weren't seen in the source and arose because of their similarity of writing styles with the author and both of them using the same third source (which wasn't IIRC cited by Grutness at first). Whether or not there's a problem, Grutness can't be closely paraphrasing lines which they didn't read. Nil Einne (talk) 13:44, 21 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: P.S. Just to be clear I'm not saying Grutness is lying in fact to be honest I don't really want to get involved in the dispute. My point is we either assume Grutness did closely paraphrase all those lines from the original source in which case we can perhaps AGF they are not remembering correctly when they said they didn't read the lines. But even with that AGF, their statements that they didn't as well as their reasoning are not ideal. In that situation, perhaps accusing Grutness of lying was too far but it's easy to see why it would be seen that way. Alternatively we can assume Grutness did not closely paraphrase and instead really came up with some of those lines independently due to the similarity in writing style and from following the other originally uncited source. In that situation, your suggestion that the Grutness case was primarily close paraphrasing seems incorrect. Nil Einne (talk) 16:54, 21 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Plagiarism

message: #First, let me say thank you for those "fighting my corner" above.
#To those who have said "you should have stayed and fought it out", that last time I got into a major conflict at Wikipedia, my health collapsed and I ended up in hospital. I am not willing to have that happen again.
#It became clear to me fairly quickly that Rjanag was not in a mood to discuss the situation - I was being called a plagiarist and a liar. Not only did I find this personally appalling, in my position as a professional writer any such allegations could seriously affect my career. As such, rather than let it continue into a full-blown battle, I decided that withdrawing from Wikipedia was the best expedient.
#When I originally expanded the article, I took information from several sources. Most of this work was done at the public library, as I did not have home access to the hard-copy books from which several parts of the material were taken. Unfortunately, I wrote down page numbers but not full information of the books' title, authors, ISBN etc. I constructed the article offline, and later at home added more information from the DNZB web article before uploading the full article to WP. The following day, I returned to the library and found the information about the original publications and added it to the references section. I can understand Rjanag thinking that large amounts of the information came from the DNZB article, simply because for a few hours that was the only listed reference. The thing that surprises me the most - and clearly made Rjanag suspicious, correction, accusatory - is that several key phrases agreed with that article, especially in sections which had not come from that article. In these cases, for the most part - as pointed out above - official titles were a major contributing factor (in fact, the longest identical phrase found by the duplication detector was, IIRC, "knight of the Priory in New Zealand of the Order of St John in 1970 for his contribution to the St John’s Ambulance Association"). I'd also point out that at least one of the "plagiarised" lines Rjanag linked was poorly written in the original, and I would not have copied it ("manager of the 1960 New Zealand rugby league team to Britain" is ungrammatical). I'd also note, as I did to Rjanag, that I have worked with the author of that article, and as such, it is perhaps not surprising if we have a similar writing style.
#Again, thank you. I intend to stay clear of Wikipedia for the time being at least, though a considerable number of editors have contacted me both via my user talk page and email to ask me to reconsider. At the moment the real world is throwing up large amounts of work (I am currently involved in writing a book on art and also have extra newspaper work, and I have also returned to musical performance), so any return to Wikipedia will have to wait for a while. Hopefully it will also give this a chance to further blow over. 
Grutness...wha? 23:13, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: A few small comments

message: As a point of interest (but probably not worthy of inclusion in the article), the resident cat at the University of Canterbury Students' Association in the early 1970s was named "Tom Skinner". The UCSA has often had a resident cat - a more recent one had a bar named after him. There is a grave marker for Tom Skinner Cat (died 1974) outside the UCSA building. dramatic (talk) 20:21, 25 October 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for this info. While it is possibly wrong for the article, it is the only answer I found on the web about the message on the plaque on that rock. It seems Wikipedia talk pages are not indexed by search engines, so the only way I got here was through a very specific Google search ("tom skinner" "cat" "ucsa" - with the quotes) and a Wikiwand page - it took me a while to realise that this was just a normal English Wikipedia talk page. "Suppressed" is perhaps too strong a term, but you get the idea... I didn't know if the mention of Tom Skinner on the plaque was satirical (I vaguely knew he was something to do with unions, and was presumably dead), or if he was a real cat, so in a practical sense this does have relevance to the article. The more recent cat was Bentley - he was always very friendly and I'd stop and give him a pat when I rounded the UCSA building corner by the Student Health end (within about 3m of that rock), unless he was asleep in the bushes. As I write this, that end of the building is all that stands currently, and will be demolished over the next few days. (FWIW, because this will all be suppressed.) Adx (talk) 00:21, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Namesake cat