Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-1713281-20140515085613/@comment-61022-20140516021839

Hey guys.

Yeah I've noticed a few things here or there, a lot of them are old items.

@GrnMarvl14 was right about the Dracula article. Completely lifted of the Appendix. Another one I noticed is the one for Johnny Storm. It actually is almost word for word out of the most recent handbook for the most part. I noticed that when I was going through and doing my expanded history of the character.

I think we should go through and check all the major characters first. I think the easiest ways to check for plagerism is to copy whole chunks of text and popping them in Google. If they pop up somewhere else, bingo, it's pretty simple. If we want to scrutinize more, we could look at the most recent handbooks and check and see if its word for word copying.

I think we should probably focus on the pages that have no reference tags. That should be the first cue that stuff was probably cribbed from other sources.

My recommendations:

Tags I like the tag when something is coded as plagiarism. But I think we should also add a tag for pages that don't have any sources.. Something that goes to the top of the page that advises the reader that none or the majority of the information on the page is not referenced. It should also mention that if any material on the page is plagiarized to contact an admin immediately and perhaps have a link to a list of admins.

Lock Down

I am in favour of locking down pages completely. Especially ones that are prone to plagiarism, which are usually mythological characters and popular flagship heroes that people are too lazy to research past histories. I was looking at the protection options. I think we could put on Protection Locks on pages to varying degrees. I think stopping unregistered or new users from contributing to some pages might be a good idea until they figure out how the Wiki works. Because I think in a lot of cases people just don't know better. I think with the mega popular characters we should make them admin only protection locks. That I'd save for major characters. Spider-Man and the like.

I say this because they would be the most common ones for plagiarism, and also to be honest with you guys, I am tired of people going in and updating a page every time such-and-such a character has a new issue come out. It was like that during the whole Superior Spider-Man and the return of Peter Parker. Every damn day people were updating the Spider-Man page.

I think locking down the major pages would prevent plagiarism, eliminate editing wars, spoilers or what I call making articles "bottom heavy*". Sure we're an open source wiki, but our resources are also spread thin because all us other admins have lives outside of the Wiki and I think we'd be saving ourselves a lot of headaches with more popular characters if we wiat until people prove themselves before we let them update the most popular pages.

Peer Review

I noticed this was a thing over at Marvel's Official Wiki: All submissions had to be peer reviewed by an admin before it was accepted. They're operating off the same Wiki software we are... So I'm wondering if we can do this as well? It would probably be the easiest thing to do. That way we can keep track of who is contributing what, and review it before it goes live so we can catch things before they are posted.

Again, if it's possible to limit this to popular or commonly plagiarized material lets do that.

Regular Reminders

I think we should remind all contributors on a daily basis. I noticed that we shoot out a message regarding spoilers when certain big events or movies are about to come out. I think we should send out on a monthly basis to everyone on the Wiki. I think it should just go a step further than just telling people don't do it. We should cite specific people like @Spencerz did in the post above, explain what they plagiarized, and what the consequence was. I think that will send a message to people better than "here are some rules" because they won't read them unless we warn them "If you don't follow these rules you will be banned just like these people..."

I think a fear and shame component might be more effective.