If you're not an administrator, don't post.
So I don't think I need to rehash that we've had major issues with plagiarism in the past; we should all be aware of that by now. And while I think we've gotten pretty good at weeding out new users posting plagiarism, I think we've lacked in the department of removing old plagiarism.
When we block a person that has been caught plagiarizing on our site, we seem to have a problem with going back and weeding out all their prior contributions that also contain plagiarized works. Which I'm in no means casting blame over; that's a massive amount of work, and we all lead full-time lives outside the site. But I think it's time for us to work on rooting out the last of the plagiarized work from our site, in order to bring us to an even higher level of validity.
I realize it may sound like I'm suggesting a lot; running a comb over each one of our 124,000+ articles would be a daunting task. But as a jumping off point, I think that a group effort to re-check the contributions of a few of our high-profile plagiarizers may clear up a good amount of our lingering issues.
So far, I've found these users that seem to have track records of adding stolen info:
- User:Leowilk - Had a number of issues that got him blocked for more than a year, plagiarizing Wikipedia being one of them
- User:Marvel and DC editor - Took info from Wikipedia and the Appendix, among others
- User:Greekpimp - The user that prompted this post. Never caught, simply faded away, but his contributions show he ripped off Wikipedia content on a number of X-Men and Students
Additionally, there are a few of our current regulars that have recently had run ins for plagiarism. It's not clear if they have examples we haven't found, but in light of being busted, it'd be a good idea to comb through their histories as well:
- User:Jacknapier10 - recently busted a few weeks ago for lifting entire articles from another wiki here on Wikia.
- User:Gemnist - Also busted for stealing recently, this time from Wikipedia. Has also been warned about copying before.
And after this thread popped up in the forums, where the owner of the Guide to the Mythological Universe website claimed that a number of our godly pantheon pages were copied from his site, I found the following users that looked to be wholly or partially responsible for the plagiarism:
- User:Raven Darkholme - Copy/pasted to the Demeter page
- User:Thor2000 - Copy/pasted to the Hera page
- User:JamieHari (Yeah, that JamieHari) - Many parts of this contribution match word-for-word, or incredibly close, to the Mythological Guide's Zeus page
^This above section highlights one of the biggest problems for our site: a number of our pages were created, or newly expanded, with direct plagiarism when we were a very young site, which has allowed the copied material to exist on the site untouched for years now. Finding stuff like this will be a much harder aspect to address.
But that's all I've got for now. I'm hoping a few of you feel up to the task of helping me root out this issue. If you have any questions/thoughts, leave them below.