Wikipedia talk:Copyright problems

This is the talk page for discussing Copyright problems and anything related to its purposes and tasks.

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This is not the page to report a specific article's copyright problem. To do so, list the article on today's entry at the project page after following the appropriate instructions.

All of our citation templates have a quote parameter which apparently is rarely used by editors except, it seems, me. We have, AFAIK, never had use instructions for this parameter. I have liberally used it to insert short quotes from the source content when the source content is extremely long for ease of WP:V. Recently, at Stephen Bassett (lobbyist), JFHJr took the position that use of the quote parameter constitutes copyvio. [1]

Because I frequently use this parameter, I'm hoping to get some feedback from the community as to its future usability, i.e. should it never be used (in which case I think we should consider deprecating it), should it be better defined in the template use instructions, are the standards I'm employing too permissive, etc.?

(My current practice to meet our fair use test of minimalism, necessity, and pecuniary protection is to (a) limit use to less than 10% of the source text, (b) only include content from the source that is necessary to support statements in the body versus extraneous information, (c) liberally use ellipses to render the quoted content unusable for anything other than verification. See here [2] for a graphic representation of current application.)

Thanks. Chetsford (talk) 23:39, 11 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Chetsford, typically, we tend to treat the quote parameter on citations the same way we treat normal quotes in the article. That means all the typical non-free content guidelines apply. That being said, historically, editors have been given more leeway when using quotes in citations in contentious topic areas.

As for your specific case, while the quotes could have been trimmed down a bit, they're not really copyvios. In your case, it's more an editorial decision with some NFCC weight than a copyright issue. The4lines |||| (talk) 16:11, 13 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I think that aligns with my thoughts on the matter. Do you think this is worth updating the citation template documentation to provide some guidance to this effect? Chetsford (talk) 16:18, 13 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, why not. I see no harm in doing that. The4lines |||| (talk) 16:27, 13 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've opened a discussion in the citation template How-To Guide here in case anyone is interested in opining. Chetsford (talk) 22:02, 13 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

While no longer in use on the Dead & Bloated article (instead a lower quality, 30 second sample is) I accidently uploaded an over 5 minute, but lower quality version of the song. Still, I'm pretty sure this is a copyright violation and I don't want people downloading it, so is there anyway it can be deleted as soon as possible. I already added a speedy deletion tag to the file page. CleoCat16 (talk) 22:37, 27 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Nevermind, it's been resolved CleoCat16 (talk) 23:42, 27 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi all, if there is a better venue for this question please point me in the right direction. I have recently been working on cleaning up a slate of articles about Mosquito species that appear to have been generated by ChatGPT or a similar LLM. I have been focusing on dealing with hallucinated sources and unverified information, but I also noticed that in many cases the LLM seems to be producing extremely close paraphrases of the text on the cited sources. For example on the article Aedes squamiger the description, distribution, behavior, and ecology sections are very close paraphrases of the text found here and here. Is this appropriate? Copyright issues are outside my normal wheelhouse so I thought I would seek guidance here. -- LWG ^talk 17:04, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

hi, World Relief currently has the page contents hidden due to a copyright investigation, however I'm not seeing the investigation ongoing here or the result. I'm not sure how to search, maybe its been overlooked? thanks JMWt (talk) 15:00, 30 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

JMWt, Hello, thanks for bringing this up. I've gone ahead and just cleaned the article myself. It looks like the editor who placed the tag, never listed the page here. In this case, the article should've been listed on this page. I'm not really sure why the editor didn't list the page here, my guess is the editor didn't know. The4lines |||| (talk) 16:16, 30 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There's also another article which was never listed, Rafael Barrientos (musician). Tenshi! (Talk page) 17:27, 30 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Cleaned. The4lines |||| (talk) 15:47, 31 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi all! The Foundation is working on developing a feature to help reduce the rate at which newcomers introduce copyright problems in their edits and assist you all with patrolling for those edits.

When the feature is deployed in the future, we plan to evaluate its effectiveness by checking whether it reduces the number of edits that are reverted due to copyright issues. In order to do that, we're looking to develop a baseline measure of the current rate of edits with copyright problems. We'd love your help with this.

So, a question: If you were to compile a list of all edits on English Wikipedia that were identified as having copyright problems, what signals would you use to make that list? Is there language used or pages linked to in edit summaries that'd be relevant? To what extent does edits that were revision-deleted with a summary linking to WP:RD1 capture the list? Thanks much for your help!

P.S. We'll be back soon to more formally introduce the feature and seek your input on its development. But feedback is always welcome at any point.

Cheers, Sdkb-WMF ^talk 04:39, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A related request has been made to share examples of phrases used to indicate reversion or deletion of copyright violating material at phab:T402601 by 9 September. I'm happy to copy across anything listed in this thread by those who aren't comfortable with contributing to Phabricator themselves. Thryduulf (talk) 14:18, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]