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After the removal of prior copyright violations and warning, more copyright violations were added and reverted. - SummerPhD (talk) 04:28, 23 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Not-quite duplicate articles[edit]

What do we do with articles that are the same topic as existing Wikipedia articles, but not exactly the same content? For example, Heat treatment processes in manufacturing (students' article, I'm having a headache with this one, btw) and Heat treatment. Any advice, pointers, etc.? Bejinhan talks 11:43, 29 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

How about userfying it, leaving a note with a link on the existing article's talk page, and leaving a note for the student explaining why? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:34, 29 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Merge any non duplicative content to main article extant, and make the new page a redirect if page name is plausible - if not, merge, and tag the new page for deletion per CSD A10.

If the article does not duplicate any existing content, but is of very poor quality, userfy, leave a note on the user's talk page with a link to the new user sub-page, and tag the leftover redirect for deletion per CSD R2. But check for WP:COPYVIO first. if you are not sure how to trace copyvios, see the instructions at WP:NPP.

--Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:46, 31 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Problem[edit]

This is turning out to be a bigger problem than I actually expected. Many of the students are using books and there is no way we can check if they are copyvio-ing when we don't have the books. It is simple enough to check for copyvios when they copy+paste from a website, but it is an entirely different matter when it comes to copy+paste from books. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with this problem? Bejinhan talks 04:32, 6 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Well, the on site CA's, i.e. the CA's from the respective colleges will have access to most of these books. But these books should have an ISBN right?? Is an ISBN search not possible?? Do you have any suspicions, I'll try to get access to these books if they are available in the libraries, but its a painstaking manual task, still I'll try. But I need suspicions. Regards, Debastein1 (talk) 05:55, 6 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict):Yes, this is an easy one. Locate the allocated Campus Administrator, and ask him/her to get the book from the college library, or to ask the student directly for it. if there is no reaction, leave a message on User talk:Hisham and User talk:Nitika.t talk pages - preferably boht (they are in charge of the project but they rarely reply to their talk page messages). --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:40, 6 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  • Bejinhan, you may have already tried this, but run a few suspicious phrases through Google anyway, regardless of what they've listed as the source. And be sure to check Google Books and Scholar separately, as the standard Google search (for some reason) doesn't always pick them up. I've found that many times the students have been listing a book source, or even a web source which covers the same material (more or less) but have actually not used them. Instead they pasted from another website which they haven't listed.
I've found that a quick way to spot copyvio is to open the editing box of the version that shows the first big addition of material. This is an example. If you see text in narrow columns instead of extending all the way to the right-hand edge of the editing box, it almost invariably means that it was pasted in from a PDF or a website. Also, a peculiar layout (which only shows up in the editing box) often indicates pasting from a website. Compare this from a WP article (scroll down to the end of the History section) and its source.
Also, look for non-standard wiki characters e.g. « » or slanted quote marks and apostrophes ? The latter are more easily seen when looking at the text in the open editing box. I've found that they are often a strong indication of copypaste.
Best, Voceditenore (talk) 08:12, 6 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, the dreaded grey box - mentioned that somewhere already. And if you see this:
[edit]
in the text, chances are that it has been copied from a site that mirrors Wikipedia content. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:19, 6 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Some of these students either have no grasp of basic English grammar/punctuation, or they are copy/pasting and not bothering to clean the text up. Please let them know that Google ignores punctuation and punctuation problems anyway, so this won't hide plagiarism but it does make it difficult for readers to read the text. Banaticus (talk) 19:06, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Article length -- it's super huge, way too long, it needs to be split up[edit]

Wikipedia:Article size suggests that 50k is probably about as long an article should be -- any longer and content should possibly be broken off into a subpage. This isn't a hard and fast rule, but it's a good general guideline. The current size of this article is 220k and it will likely grow bigger yet. That's freakishly huge. I'm going to fix this perceived problem in the following manner. You see, every page is potentially a Template. Each of the subsections on the main page could be moved off to their own page, then transcluded back the main overall page, because someone must see some value in having everything in one location or it wouldn't have been put together like that to begin with. I've taken the liberty of doing just that for one section, the Wikipedia:India Education Program/Students#Certificate - Corporate Social Responsibility .28section.29. You'll notice that the link I just gave, to a specific section of the main page, still works. You may also notice, however, that the section isn't actually there, it's on a completely different page, called a subpage because I used a / to push it to a subfolder. This has two results. 1) People like me who only desire to see a short section of a super-long page can see the short fast-loading single section. 2) People who want to see the full page (whoever created it) can still see the full page. Clicking the edit button next to a section header on the main page will have you editing the correct subsection on a particular subpage. Now, transclusion is a powerful tool and generally discouraged so that Wikipedia doesn't become a super huge spaghetti code mashup of transcluded pages/information which would make it quite difficult to edit, so don't go crazy with this technique on other pages. For a page like this one, though, which should probably be deleted when it has served its purpose, it's a fine technique in my opinion. Does this mean that the original pages could have used "noinclude", "onlyinclude" and "includeonly" markup to avoid most of the work that went into making and maintaining this page? Possibly. If you'd like any further help, contact me on my user talk page or put a {{help me}} template up on your own user talk page and someone will be along to help you. :) Banaticus (talk) 19:32, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, one of the course tables has been transcluded from a sub-page for weeks (by Ruud Koot) until it was imported into the master list yesterday (by Manishearth)... ;-) I had planned to move the tables into sub-templates myself, for the very reasons explained by you above, but I thought it would be to dangerous while we are still in the middle of the process to merge stuff into the master list and convert the tables into a uniform table format. We often need to refer to the change log to trace changes; this is getting more difficult, if we switch pages too often. I agree with you, that the tables should have been in transcluded form right from the start, so that they could be used in the master table and the course pages and still be maintained in a single place only. This is one the things I meant with "reshape" in the main discussion.
At least the 14 Symbiosis course tables seem to be mature enough right now, so you would have my okay for the move of these tables. However, please DON'T move the COEP tables, as we're heavily working on them and it will still take days to merge, verify, convert, and clean them up before they can be considered stable. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 22:55, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Pardon my ignorance, but can I ask why this conversion to machine-readable form is taking place? I'm finding in the cleanup work I'm doing that a majority of the students' work is just being deleted; and since most students appear multiple times in the table there are really far fewer contributions to check than it seems. For the ones I've checked, in many cases there is nothing left for anyone else to follow after me and look at, because almost everything the student has done will be gone. Is this conversion going to aid in additional analysis by copyright reviewers, or is it for some other reason? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:56, 16 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Mike, it is a pitty that most of the students' contributations will have to be deleted, but of course, this is not your fault at all... The reason we are doing these table merges and conversions is to compile a solid and dependable database listing all students which took part in the IEP, so that each-and-any article can be checked. Unfortuntely, the lists maintained by the IEP people themselves were very incomplete, faulty, outdated, inconsistent and partially contradicting - not all students have been listed, and many pages edited by the students (sometimes only as IPs) have not been listed as well. That's not something on which solid work could be based. For a formal and fully recursive CCI, which will not miss a single edit done by any of the students, we need proper data, and since the IEP organizers seem unable to provide it, we have to do it ourselves. See also: Wikipedia_talk:India_Education_Program, where we discussed the proposed format in details. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 05:04, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Reformat finished[edit]

See Wikipedia_talk:India_Education_Program#Reformat_finished ManishEarthTalkStalk 10:00, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]