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Our community believes we should prevent plagiarism/copyvio by flagging laxist reviewers for review-ban: Stopping tag wiki plagiarism, Part II: Taking Action

Now, in the cases of the many past plagiarisms/copyvios that were made as an initial content or an old edit, what actions to take? Example possibilities:

  1. We suggest an intermediate edit that will quickly blank/wipe out the illegal content? In that case, shall we flag reviewers who reject this type of simple erasing cleanup and favor keeping the illegal content?

  2. We suggest an elaborated edit that will fully rewrite (and that's a damn lot of work) the illegal content? In that case, shall we flag reviewers who reject this type of complex cleanup and favor keeping the illegal content?

  3. We purely stop using the suggested-edits system for copyright violations. Shall we directly ask on Meta for each and every tag individually for best suggestions on rewriting the illegal content? Someone with 20k Reputation would then apply the most voted answer.

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  • If a user with full edit privileges does the edit, doesn't that skip the entire problem with rejected reviews? Is this a big issue?
    – ivarni
    Commented Sep 2, 2017 at 7:16
  • @ivarni it will take me years to get 20K Reputation, but I'm ready to help cleanup hundreds of tags now.
    – Cœur
    Commented Sep 2, 2017 at 7:19
  • Aaah, editing tag wikis is 20k. My bad.
    – ivarni
    Commented Sep 2, 2017 at 7:30
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    Maybe concentrate on getting enough reputation to edit tag wikis? Or find some of the people who work on the tag and have enough reputation and consult with them about whether they will edit the tag because of plagiarism. If someone were to approach me about a problem (perhaps via a comment to a semi-appropriate question where I'd made a comment, or perhaps because they'd looked at my profile), I'd probably cooperate, unless I suddenly got too many such requests.
    – Jonathan Leffler
    Commented Sep 2, 2017 at 19:17
  • 1
    @JonathanLeffler yeah, lets ignore the reviewers. The problem is not their behavior at all.
    – Braiam
    Commented Sep 4, 2017 at 22:24

1 Answer 1

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Interesting thought; I hadn't foreseen that nor seen it in practice.

  1. We suggest an intermediate edit that will quickly blank/wipe out the illegal content? In that case, shall we flag reviewers who reject this type of simple erasing cleanup and favor keeping the illegal content?

Probably not, unless it becomes a pattern. As a moderator, I can't really justify taking direct action on these reviewers beyond a quick heads-up on what's going on... which you can do just as well as I can.

Definitely let us know if someone's obviously, willingly, consciously keeping this stuff around after a friendly warning, though.

  1. We suggest an elaborated edit that will fully rewrite (and that's a damn lot of work) the illegal content? In that case, shall we flag reviewers who reject this type of complex cleanup and favor keeping the illegal content?

Same as (1) above, with the added wrinkle that the replacement content may actually be incorrect or otherwise inappropriate (and thus even harder for me to justify direct action)

  1. We purely stop using the suggested-edits system for copyright violations. Shall we directly ask on Meta for each and every tag individually for best suggestions on rewriting the illegal content? Someone with 20k Reputation would then apply the most voted answer.

That'll get messy fast, and it's probably overkill for something like this.

As a moderator, it's sometimes hard to put myself in non-diamond shoes - it's just easy for me to take care of everything I see. It's also easy to forget how difficult some parts of the system are for non-moderators. Tag wikis are one of those parts.

In general, suggestions to wipe content should take care of the vast majority of these cases. Craft your suggestion comment right, and most reviewers should see what's up. It's even more unlikely to get two of these in a row, if you must.

If I needed to go through the suggestion system to handle these, I'd probably follow a process similar to the following:

  1. Send in an edit wiping the tag wiki and rewriting the excerpt as minimally as possible1 (and please don't copy Wikipedia :)).

  2. Look through the revision history to see who added the plagiarism originally - there's usually more there. For each copied wiki you find from the user's suggestion/edit history, repeat (1)

  3. Raise a flag on one of the user's posts if (and only if) one of the following is true:

    • It's a 'hot' case - the user is doing this currently, on an ongoing basis, or in a timeframe near enough to the present that it's reasonable for us to warn them.
    • Your edits are being rejected. We can retroactively approve those edits that were being rejected, or just clear the wiki/excerpt ourselves. Depends on the position of the moon.
    • Something else weird is happening that deserves our attention.

I'm sure I'm missing something here, but the general recipe should work: Do what you can, escalate when you need to. And, ideally, don't be annoying to other folks when you're doing this (like those misguided reviewers). Helpful (which might include pointing those reviewers to a meta post), but not aggravating.

1 this is another one of those blind spots - excerpts can't be cleared. Diamond moderators can through an obscure process, but that doesn't help this question much.

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