Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 89

message: SlimVirgin suggested that someone, up above, might have been "advocating plagiarism" and asked if he knew that plagiarism and copyright are separate issues. I'd like to say a few words about the differences here.
Copyright is a legal matter, an artificial property right intended, in the long run, to enrich the public domain by encouraging writers and other creators to produce material that will eventually be added to it. We are very careful about copyright because we don't want the WikiMedia foundation to get sued (whether or not we individually agree with the theory behind it). The essence of copyright is whether you are using the words that others put together in a certain way, not their ideas.
Plagiarism, on the other hand, is not a legal matter at all, but a question of academic ethics. Its essence has nothing to do with whether you use someone else's words, but only with whether you give credit.
Now, in cases where text is taken directly from a public domain or GFDL source and modified, there is no copyright issue for the PD text, and there is no copyright issue with GFDL provided we comply with its terms (which require attribution).
Is there a plagiarism issue? No, as long as we give credit. As long as you properly acknowledge the creators of the material, you are not plagiarizing (though you may be committing a copyright violation, but not in the cases discussed).
Some contributors seem to be talking about a different issue, what in Europe is called "moral rights of authorship" or some such, the right to control modifications of a work. But that's a copyright issue, and we're talking about cases where the copyright has expired or is licensed to us. Making such derivative works is not plagiarism, nor, in the cases we're discussing, is it a copyright violation. --Trovatore 08:18, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Copyright is not a Style issue.  Giving credit is a Citation and Verifiability issue (in the Wikipedia environment; these also help with the ethical environment). Cut-and-paste may include unusual styles to be ruthlessly edited.  (SEWilco 16:32, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Plagiarism vs copyvio

message: I see the MoS suggests styles for Quotations but does not define what is a Quotation.  (SEWilco 16:32, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: What is a Quotation

message: For anyone who might have wondered -- most of my Wiki-related energy these days has been taken up in working a particular article I'm involved with out of a very bad, fully-protected version (an effort that's finally bearing fruit, I'm glad to say); my attention to the issue with plagiarism arose out of that effort. But I'm wiped out. And frankly I'm shocked & demoralized to discover that a significant proportion of Wikipedians think that plagiarism is perfectly okay, just so long as it's only the public domain that's being plagiarized. So, on this issue, okay, fine, plagiarize away, I don't have the energy to fight it. If someone else does, I'll be glad to act in support, but meantime I'll put what energy I do have in completing the job on the article that we're finally getting some movement on. Thanks to all those who spoke out against plagiarism, & my apologies for not being able to follow through here. --Yksin 17:11, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  No energy for this