Hello. I have been reading the article on Sangorski & Sutcliffe that you wrote on Tuesday evening, inspired no doubt by the Radio 4 piece that day.
Judging from the text of your article, it looks like you have relied quite heavily on the Shepherds history page at http://bookbinding.co.uk/History.htm Most of the Wikipedia article is awfully similar to that source material, and some parts are directly copied, which gives me some concerns as to potential copyright violation.
Please don't take this the wrong way - it is great that you are adding content - but I am not at all convinced that the slight changes you have made are enough to avoid copyright concerns. I am tempted to ask for further outside input, perhaps at Wikipedia talk:Copyright problems, but wanted to see what you thought first. -- Testing times (talk) 13:10, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for the reply. Some parts of the bookbinding.co.uk website seem to be copied without any changes, which is only allowed if they give us permission to copy their text (i.e. it is freely licenced) or it is in the public domain. I have posted at Wikipedia:Copyright problems, and added a temporary version at Talk:Sangorski & Sutcliffe/Temp. The ((copyvio)) template tells me to post the text below (my apologies for the tone of the template text below). -- Testing times (talk) 17:40, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
This is apparently the standard message put on the talk page of anyone who has written a piece that somebody thinks raises a copyright problem regarding source. It does not address the issue of exactly what is defined as "copyrighted text"; it just assumes it is self-evident. It has several links to supposed Wikipedia guidance; and the main one, Wikipedia:Copyright violations has a whole lot more links to further pages. They give instructions on how to ask for permission to use copyrighted material, and how to use Wikipedia admin processes when a copyright infringement is suspected; but it says nothing about how to decide whether a piece is sufficiently close to a source to constitute a breach of copyright.
I claim that my piece is written by me although it happens to be based on a single source (but only because there is apparently no other source on the web for the facts derived from the Shepherd's site) but was not just copied and pasted from it The text was simply written in roughly the same sequence of presentation and including the same facts, so that the observed similarity is inevitable. I do not see that the offered replacement for my page is any different; it is simply another rearrangement of the same facts using words and sentences based on the same single source.
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia! We welcome and appreciate your contributions, such as Sangorski & Sutcliffe, but we regretfully cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from either web sites or printed material. This article appears to be a copy from http://bookbinding.co.uk/History.htm, and therefore a copyright violation. The copyrighted text has been or will soon be deleted. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with our copyright policy. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing.
If you believe that the article is not a copyright violation, or if you have permission from the copyright holder to release the content freely under allowance license, then you should do one of the following:
It may also be necessary for the text be modified to have an encyclopedic tone and to follow Wikipedia article layout. For more information on Wikipedia's policies, see Wikipedia's policies and guidelines.
If you would like to begin working on a new version of the article you may do so at this temporary page. Leave a note at Talk:Sangorski & Sutcliffe saying you have done so and an administrator will move the new article into place once the issue is resolved. Thank you, and please feel welcome to continue contributing to Wikipedia. Happy editing! Testing times (talk) 17:40, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
This was, not necessarily completely relevantly, added to the talk page of Testing times, the person who flagged the S&S article matter. I think that is where it is usual to post replies to messages from people to one's own talk page: to their talk page; but this makes the following of dialogues a bit inconvenient, which is why I question its correctness and therefore the relevance of the reply to the talk page of the person who left one a message. SO I have moved that to here and just put one line directing Testing times to here if he wants to see this continuation.
I think the problem I had with the complaint about copying remains: I do not know how to fix it within the other rules of wiki in the particular case of a sole brief source of information from which one needs to use almost all of the facts. From the BBC piece, the topic seemed Quite Interesting and, as a notable landmark in a little-known but intricate art & craft, appropriate for a shortish wiki article. Yet when I searched for information, I found only the Shepherd's history page. I made an attempt to rewrite it a little but with no additional facts and not a lot of time to hack at it to effectively "disguise" it more than I managed to, what I left evidently was insufficiently different for the wiki copyright mavens. I don't have many minutes a week to spend on wiki these days; I have had no time to add much for months. If what you have on the temp page is OK, let it stand. Tonight I have hunted on Wiki's pages about the copyright issue for some clear guideline on how much different a text has to be not to be regarded as "copied and pasted"; therefore I ask: is wiki banning itself from covering any topic about which there is only one source --- either one acknowledged to be authoritative, or one of any quality? For such topics, is the logic "Only one source? Not notable enough to be in wiki at all" ? Or is it just "you have to move the words around more so it doesn't look copied"? Whichever of these it is, I think we should be told which and (if the latter) how.
This issue is arguably going to arise ever more often in the future with wiki; as its already vast coverage of all fields and details of human knowledge grows, the typical level of notoriety (that's notability taken to extremes) of new topics will obviously drift downwards. Obviously: it is human nature for people to think of the most important topics first and fill in the others in (over a vast enough sample) an order of generally decreasing importance/notability/fame what-have-you. And in the limit, as here, you then start to hit topics for which there is only one source of information, and every time you do that there will be a problem of how much you have to change the sentences in the text of the new article so that it does not infringe the copyright of the sole source of information, the original article, the authority, the reference. In a way this is associated with the problem of "no original research": if I went to Shepherds and asked very nicely and sat in their archive and made notes and came home and wrote an article for wikipedia, it would be original research and banned. I'd have to get it published somewhere else (say in a book) and then quote that to get past the demand for authorities & references. But if the topic is not important enough to expect big sales, the book publishing industry will not look at it. So if I do the work in the archive to avoid the Shepherds website author's copyright I get done on "no original research", and if I don't do the work but rely on their text, it's a copyright problem. Between them these two rules end up preventing any topic below a certain level of fame being covered at all even if they are factual, interesting, and intellectually important (that is, in this case, seen as a noteworthy pair of figures and an era in the history of the bookbinding art and craft).
And thus back to the point above: if this argument of despair is to be avoided, we need wiki Guidance: how much must a text differ (be changed) from its information source in order not to be a copyright problem? Is it even always possible, given a topic with only one not very detailed source, to create something with the same amount of information and detail without it being seen as a copyright violation? Does changing the order of the sentences, and the order of words in those sentences, plus a few replacements with synonyms or paraphrases, fix it? Iph (talk) 00:52, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
Original | Your version |
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Sutcliffe specialised in gold finishing and Sangorski worked as a forwarder. Within a year they were teaching bookbinding at Camberwell College of Art, and in recognition of their exceptional talents, their scholarships were extended for another year. | Sutcliffe specialised in gold finishing and Sangorski worked as a forwarder. Within a year they were themselves both teaching bookbinding at Camberwell School of Art and Crafts, and in recognition of their exceptional talents, their scholarships were extended for another year. |
With the coal strike of 1901 the economy slumped and work at the Cockerell bindery diminished. The two junior employees were laid off. Despite the difficult economic climate, they decided to set up a new business together. They founded Sangorksi & Sutcliffe on 1st October 1901. | With the coal strike of 1901 the economy slumped, and work at the Cockerell bindery diminished. The two junior employees were laid off. Despite the difficult economic climate, with their strong friendship they decided to set up a new business together. They founded Sangorksi & Sutcliffe on 1st October 1901. |
Their first rented premises were an attic room in Bloomsbury, but they soon moved around the corner to larger rooms in Vernon Place. In 1905, they moved yet again, to Southampton Row ... produced many of their greatest early works. The golden age of the company was in those early years of intense creativity. | Their first rented premises were an attic room in Bloomsbury, soon followed by a move around the corner to larger rooms in Vernon Place. In 1905, the bindery moved again, this time to Southampton Row ... produced many of their greatest early works. The golden age of the company was in these early years of intense creativity. |