Talk:Water supply and sanitation in Russia

Water High‑importance

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Russia High‑importance

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Sanitation Mid‑importance

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Possible copyright problem[edit]

This article has been revised as part of a large-scale clean-up project of multiple article copyright infringement. (See the investigation subpage) Earlier text must not be restored, unless it can be verified to be free of infringement. For legal reasons, Wikipedia cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or printed material; such additions must be deleted. Contributors may use sources as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences or phrases. Accordingly, the material may be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously. Mkativerata (talk) 20:25, 1 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Mkativerata: Thank you for detecting the copyright violation(s) on this page. In your first edit, you removed material that was copied and pasted by Superzohar from http://www.promitheasnet.kepa.uoa.gr/Promitheas4/images/file/1.2%20Russia.pdf, as stated in your edit summary and as I could just verify. However, in your second edit for which you did not give a clear edit summary, you removed sections of the article whose sources were clearly attributed. Please check again if indeed these sections constitute copyright violations. If the content should have been deleted by mistake, please restore it.--Mschiffler (talk) 06:26, 2 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Mschiffler. Thanks for your note. I'm genuinely sorry that this has happened to the article. I'll explain the second edit in a bit more detail. The content I removed was all added by an editor who, we now know, was literally copy-pasting things into Wikipedia over a period of seven years. The (depressing and alarming) evidence of this is here; it is one of the worst cases I have seen. Our copyright policy says what happens when we find such an editor:

If contributors have been shown to have a history of extensive copyright violation, it may be assumed without further evidence that all of their major contributions are copyright violations, and they may be removed indiscriminately.

That's pretty much what happened here. I checked the article to make sure that the material wasn't copy-pasted from a public domain source or another wikipedia article. It wasn't. So I had to presume that it was copied from one or more websites that are no longer available, or books that are not web-searchable. This editor almost never wrote things in his own words, so that presumption is almost certainly safe.

And actually, now that I have had a second look, I have found a source for much of the copying that I removed in the second edit. The whole of the "Responsibility for service provision" section of the article, and a lot of the "Service provision by the private sector" section, was copied from this January 2005 paper. Yet that paper is not attributed as the source for the material copied into the article (instead, other sources are attributed, which is particularly insidious).

I tried to take as much care as I could to ensure all of your contributions to the article were retained (and I hope I didn't inadvertently remove any). But beyond that, it really all has to go, I'm afraid. --Mkativerata (talk) 07:36, 2 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the explanation. Thank you also for your work in detecting copyright violations, as well as removing copyrighted, unattributed additions to Wikipedia. I know how important that work is to protect Wikipedia. Given that much of the content removed is relevant and useful, would it be o.k. to add brief summaries of that content using my own words while clearly attributing the source? In addition, I suggest to check all the other sources quoted that were removed to see if some of the content removed may actually be in these sources. I presume that this is o.k., but wanted to check with you before proceeding in that direction.--Mschiffler (talk) 20:07, 2 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Mschiffler, there is not a problem with doing that at all. Thank you for trying to rebuild the article! --Mkativerata (talk) 20:27, 2 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Soviet Era construction[edit]

I'm pretty sure that Russian sewer and fresh water systems were expanded on considerably during the Soviet era2604:3D09:D08A:100:904C:4CC2:B99E:3FB1 (talk) 21:36, 7 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]