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Re: [dinosaur] 21st-century ethics was Re: Tyrannosaurus + Torosaurus + robot design + more



The edit in question which got removed was to state, in the body of the article text, "the following has been blatantly plagiarized" with a link to the blog at the beginning of the offending section. No accusations of "not being a known Wikipedia editor" were made, and the edit seems to have been removed because it got flagged as vandalism or something. In any case, criticisms like this get a citation needed or go in the talk page, not the body of the text itself.

I've done the best I can to restore the important information I can without being able to read the paper which named Leogorgon--if anyone can help me find a copy of it it would be appreciated.

Ivakhnenko MF. 2003. Eotherapsids from the East European Placket (Late Permian). Paleontological Journal 37:S339âS465.

On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 10:03 AM David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at> wrote:
Gesendet:ÂDienstag, 09. Oktober 2018 um 21:51 Uhr
Von:Â"Ben Creisler" <bcreisler@gmail.com>
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> Plagiarism of Leogorgon Blog On Wikipedia
>
> https://www.dinosaurhome.com/plagiarism-of-my-leogorgon-blog-on-wikipedia-15760.html
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I tried to leave a comment there, but "[o]ur system identified your recent request as a potential threat to our site and blocked it. If you believe this was done wrongfully please accept our apologies and contact us." (That may be because my address is spoofed fairly often â every once in a while I get spam "from myself".) I did that â and got exactly the same error message again, despite the Captcha. So I'll have to comment on that post here.
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First of all, "plagiarism on Wikipedia" is a somewhat... silly concept. Wikipedia does not pretend to contain any original work in the first place; instead, and famously, "original research" is explicitly forbidden. When a citation is missing, the thing to do is neither to complain nor to delete anything, but to add that citation.
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And indeed, in the second comment, the author claims to have tried to edit the page in some unspecified way, "but the edit was removed because Iâm not a known Wikipedia editor."
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That is completely ridiculous on the part of whoever removed the edit. Although getting an account isn't any kind of big deal (just come up with a username and a password), it is by no means required. Anybody â no matter how anonymous â can edit almost any page, that's the whole point of Wikipedia. Edits aren't supposed to be judged by who made them. Nobody could have any reason to complain about an added citation.
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The post ends in:
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"Update (10/8/2018)
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The plagiarized text has now been deleted."
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To delete information from Wikipedia is, of course, a completely preposterous thing to do. It's a step in the wrong direction. (Outside of very special cases that don't apply here, of course.)
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Unfortunately I personally won't have time to fix this situation for about two weeks. (I have a Wikipedia account, and have even edited pages while being logged in, so there won't be any silly claims of "not a known Wikipedia editor".) I hope someone beats me to it.
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BTW, whoever administers dinosaurhome.com should be aware that the claim under the error message, which says in boldface that one's comment isn't lost and can be retrieved by just clicking on the Back button, is incorrect. Yes, even in my browser, where blog comments can normally be retrieved this way.