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How would we feel about stopping the practice of blanking potential copyvios?

It is an old practice from before the days of Demote/Promote.  These articles are not visible to anyone without a direct link and search engines are kept well away.

How would stopping blanking help?  Blanking prevents a copyvio reviewer from seeing the original article if needed without taking extra (History) steps.  If an author admits to copying but would like to rewrite their article then they have nothing to work with unless they are given a revision link to work from, not obviously easy for a new author.

What do we think?

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If it’ll stop you saying the word “sigh” out loud then I’m all in favour of stopping the blanking!!!  

(Dave, please note the multiple unnecessary exclamation marks intended to emphasise the strength of my feeling on this matter!   *sigh*   ;-) )

As I understand it, the potential copyright violation pages are only visible to people who’ve gone to the trouble of joining wikiHow, because they haven’t yet cleared quality control, so I don’t understand why you (one) would blank a page if it’s not gone public anyway  -  am I right in this?  

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Hah, anything to make Dave stop sighing! I don’t feel strongly on blanking or not blanking, itself - as you both said, it’s a bit of an old habit from when we didn’t have the Article Review category and orange blur and all that. The only thing that gives me a bit of pause is the idea of rewriting in general, from most of the spammy copyvio types, these days. The rewrite *really* has to be super thorough for us to consider putting it live, since crossposted content is generally a no-go these days (doesn’t really offer anything new to readers, is generally bad for how readers and search engines perceive us, and to be honest most copyvios I’ve seen over the last couple of years aren’t all that high quality or ready to go live anyway!)… A lot of the copyvio folks I’ve talked with over the last couple of years are looking to build backlinks anyway (ie wanting to include their link for ‘credit’), which is also not ideal… spammy stuff, often bordering on ‘content farm’ material that they’re trying to get featured on different sites across the web. So I often take the liberty of just explaining those best practices for promotion to them (ie that they’ll need to use an all-new/unique approach and wording and to avoid any promotional editing or spammy linking), and then removing their pages completely so they can start over… that way, the copyvio bot will check any new submission, which it won’t with a rewrite (someone would have to manually recheck the page to make sure it didn’t have a crossposted match anymore). But I’m dealing mostly with the spammy copyvios, and there might be a set of more genuine promising authors out there who do tackle rewrites - have you seen much of that, Dave? Folks who successfully rewrite in a non-spammy way? Either way, we could stop blanking… I just don’t want spammy types to think that means they can make a few little tweaks, get iffy content live, and keep on ‘building backlinks’ and whatnot. But if it would help genuine, helpful good faith contributors, then that’s definitely another story:slight_smile:PS Edit to add - maybe there’s even room to treat these two situations differently? For example, for good faith folks who don’t initially understand copyright but are game to help or to share their advice without linking, they could be left unblanked and encouraged to rewrite with an all-new approach so we can promote it… but for those sharing crossposted content for the purpose of spamminess, we could treat them like we do actual content farm submissions and remove regardless of permission, encouraging them to share advice in a new and neutral way instead? I don’t want to overcomplicate the system though, so maybe that’s too involved! Either way, though, I def advocate room for admin discretion on removing pages that hit all three criteria: a) they aren’t live, b) are crossposted in a spammy way (eg with a link back or other promotion in it), and c) in terms of quality, they push that content farm boundary. It isn’t too hard to tell who’s really here to help, with neutral and genuinely helpful advice, over the content marketing types, so I’d encourage any admins to feel empowered to weed out the iffy promotion attempts and focus all our efforts on helping the helpful people instead!

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Though my opinion is just a small one, I agree. I don’t like the blanking, but I can live with it.

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Same. I must say I was startled at first to find a completely blank page with a tag, but now that I know what it is about, I don’t really mind it as much.

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If stopping blanking makes it easier, then why not? I’m all for making tasks less time consuming and tedious.

To address what @Anna is saying about spammers, I think that maybe this can be helped by maybe tweaking the wording on the {{ copyvio }} templates.

For example, something that might confuse users is the first point on the template, which says, “This page can remain on wikiHow only if we receive confirmation that we have permission from the copyright holder to post it here. Please indicate that we have the copyright holder’s permission by posting on the discussion page . Unless the copyright status of this content is clarified, this page will not be shown in search results and may soon be removed from wikiHow.” might confuses users into thinking that if they give permission, then the content can say on wikiHow even though point 3 says that it can (but I think that point 3 is also confusing as I will explain below). I don’t know what this could be changed to say though, does anybody have any ideas?

Also, point 3 of the template says, “Articles that are word-for-word copies from other sites are unlikely to be published fully live on wikiHow, even with the copyright holder’s permission. If you’d like us to remove the article so you can republish your ideas in the form of unique content instead, please let us know.” I think that this point should be more stern and say that articles that are word-for-word copies will not be published live on wikiHow (instead of saying “unlikely”) and will be deleted, and that articles need to be thoroughly rewritten in order to say on wikiHow.

I also think that the talk page message generated by that template could be improved. For example, the talk page message on the copyvio template says, “Since we generally don’t promote live articles that have been taken word-for-word from elsewhere, though, your best bet is still to rework the content into something new and uniquely helpful, using multiple reputable sources.” Perhaps this section should be changed to make it more clear that the article needs to be thoroughly rewritten (instead of saying “rework”) and it should be clear that the article will otherwise be deleted.

Maybe we could put something in the templates referencing the External Links Policy and how we aren’t a site for building backlinks, since that seems to be a something that is dealt with a lot when it comes to copyright violations.

Anyways, I know that we aren’t talking about the templates, but maybe changing them will make it more clear to new users about what they need to do if they want to save the article. It’s just an idea.

Also, the deletion policy allows articles to be speedy deleted if they are content farm submissions, maybe we should be a little bit more aggressive in how we enforce that part of the deletion policy?

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Good point, @R2_d2000 ! Some of the language when it comes to copyvios and speedies is, like the blanking itself, kind of outdated now. We’ve evolved but the older templates haven’t! Your suggestions would def help alleviate my concerns - if folks agree about the general idea of updating the copyvio templates as you suggested and clarifying the speedy language to make it clear that admins can be more aggressive regarding copyvio deletions for content farmy/crossposted submissions, I’d be happy to work on that. I need to update those templates to put Jayne’s email in rather than mine this week, anyway, so I can do it at the same time, if everyone here is on board. What do others think? Wording ideas def welcome, too! And with more clarity upfront about crossposted content and copyvios not being put live even with permission (unless they’re rewritten), then blanking would def seem like a less necessary extra hurdle, so maybe Dave could sigh less:slight_smile:

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I would also agree with updating the templates.:slight_smile:

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Thanks everyone.  Offers to rewrite are very rare @Anna , always in good faith, and never requested by spammers.  I maybe see this 2 or 3 times a year.

Yes, revisiting the wording of the templates would be sensible.  It’s the {{copyvior}} template that suggests rewriting, as @R2_d2000 pointed out:  “…your best bet is still to rework the content into something new and uniquely helpful, using multiple reputable sources. Does that sound doable?”

@Anna , your concerns about spammers finding loopholes here are unnecessary.  This is the land where I Speedy delete not just content farm submissions but egregious directory listings (see the deletion log for my Speedy - Spam deletions) this happens most days.  In the also rare cases where an author confirms copyright they are thanked, the tag is removed and the NFD system steps in.  I haven’t seen a spam article survive this process in years.

So, not blanking potential articles might be a thing we’d consider?

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@Davecrosby That’s good to hear! Here and there I’ve seen some unblanked with permission without speedy, but I’ve not been in the habit of following up on them later, so if they generally are NFD-ed, that sounds good! And if boosters/admins are all on the same page that any that might survive that vote or not be NFD-ed shouldn’t be put live without complete rewrites, that likely covers all the scenarios. In one-off cases where the need for a rewrite might not be clear to subsequent editors months later, I suppose we can always add an {{attention}} tag or similar when the copyvio is removed, to make the remaining issues clear to all (sounds very rare, though!). Folks seem to agree that some template tweaks will prob help there, too, so I’ll put that on my to-dos for the next week or so. If anyone has suggestions or wants to help, feel free to share here or ping me or dive in! Sounds like the guide on handling copyvios will need an update to remove the blanking bit, too:slight_smile:

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@Davecrosby @Anna +1

Maybe we should stop blanking copyright violations.

Of course there will always be cases where an article gets put live and it is later determined that the article violated copyrights ( example, since fixed ) but those are completely different scenarios than deindexed/hidden articles with copyright violations on them.

The only time I think articles should be blanked for copyright violations is if it is live.  Then, the article can be demoted quickly and unblanked for further improvement.

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@Anna , I know that some templates like stub and NFD will hide an article from search results if you put them on an article, do the copyright violation templates do that as well?

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Yep R2, they do; deindexing just isn’t immediately effective since search engines can take a while to catch up. That being said, copyright issues with articles that are live/indexed and not new are pretty darn rare, and usually turn out to be the other site copying us rather than this way around… So if you find one, it’s best to let me or JayneG or Chris-H know so we can dig into it and follow up with anyone involved as needed, rather than demoting or stubbing something that might not need it, unless the situation is very clear-cut and obvious. Def rare to come across that kind of thing, though, so I think it’s fair still to change the process with regards to blanking, like Dave suggested here, since 99.9%+ of these pages are new and not yet live:slight_smile: