Talk:Gladewater, TX

VFD discussion
This article does cite its source as a reference but seems to copy verbatim from the source, which as I understand is a copyvio. --Comment by Selfie City  ( talk  |  contributions ) 14:17, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
 * We don't delete real places, but we do delete text that violates copyright. I have deleted the text and redirected to our existing article. Ground Zero (talk) 16:31, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
 * What about revision deletions? --Comment by Selfie City  ( talk  |  contributions ) 16:34, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't understand the question. Ground Zero (talk) 16:40, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Should we revision delete the edits including the copyvio? --Comment by Selfie City  ( talk  |  contributions ) 16:49, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Our copyright violation policy Copyright-related issues doesn't give us any guidance here. Deleting the edits seems to make sense, but it doesn't seem to be mandated. What do others think? Ground Zero (talk) 18:05, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
 * It doesn't do any harm and it might do some good saving the WMF some bucks on legal fees defending our sorry rumps from a suit.--ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 18:50, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
 * ✅ --Comment by Selfie City  ( talk  |  contributions ) 19:19, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
 * It makes me wonder if this should be built into policy, but after my last run at changing policy, I don't have the stomach for it. Ground Zero (talk) 19:46, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

[outdent] When an article has no content but a copyvio deleting (stating the reason) is the sensible action. Normally we keep the history because we merge the content into the redirect target. With copyvios we don't want to do that. If we want to merge something we should attribute the original source instead. But it is more complicated if there have been valuable edits since the copyvio content was added. In that situation keeping also the copyvio versions is more or less necessary to provide proper attribution and let later readers and editors understand how the article has evolved. My view is that copyvios in the history are no big problem – the history is more or less our internal working copies, and the source is elsewhere on the net, easy to copy from there instead. --LPfi (talk) 20:13, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
 * (edit conflict) We need to be very judicious with the use of revdel. In terms of copyright, I think continuing to identify and eliminate copyvio in our currently active content is the extent of what we need to do proactively. In cases where the owner of a particular piece of copyrighted content doesn't feel that approach goes far enough, litigation would rarely if ever be the first resort. We would first receive a cease and desist letter, which typically would give us a specified amount of time to scrub the content from the page history, at which point one of us (or, more likely, WMF Legal) could then revdel the offending diffs. But I think doing so in advance flies too much in the face of the principles of openness and transparency which are among the core values of the Wikimedia movement, especially in cases like LPfi describes where a particular diff contains not only copyvio but also useful content whose attribution we would need to preserve per the terms of the Creative Commons license we use. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 20:15, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
 * LPfi and AndreCarrotflower are making a lot sense here. Ground Zero (talk) 20:57, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I have restored all but the first revision of the article for that reason, as that was the edit that inserted the copyvio. --Comment by Selfie City  ( talk  |  contributions ) 21:00, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
 * We routinely delete copyvio articles. Is anyone suggesting we should stop doing that? Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:30, 2 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Result: redirect to Gladewater. --Comment by Selfie City  ( talk  |  contributions ) 16:57, 13 July 2020 (UTC)