Fandom received a formal complaint that the members of this wiki are plagiarizing articles and code from Logopedia. This means that people have been copying from Logopedia without saying they did so. It happened enough it had to be brought to Fandom's attention.
They provided examples. I verified the examples were correct and reverted or deleted what was plagiarized. I also saw other examples that clearly showed the pages had been copied from from Logopedia.
Copying from another is allowed if the other wiki is credited. The official ways to give credit are in the "Attribution" and "Using Fandom Content" sections of Fandom's Licensing page. In short, you provide a link to the original page, a link to another site that has the info and all proper credits, or you list all authors that wrote what you copied.
An informal method of giving credit is putting it in the Edit Summary (the line that says "Describe what you changed"). Examples:
- List of Mickey Mouse's voice actors copied from the Disney Wiki.
- Background info on the creation of the printing press adapted from the article on Wikipedia.
If you don't put anything in the edit summary, by default it means you are saying you are the original person who wrote this because your user name or IP address is recorded in the edit history log for the page. If you copied the info and didn't fill out the edit summary, plagiarism happens automatically whether you intended to do it or not.
The edit summary is almost never filled in. Even if plagiarism wasn't a problem, edit summaries are important because they can make the difference between an edit being a simple mistake and being mistaken for vandalism. Everyone needs to start filling in the edit summary.
What happens now
We have to start fixing this immediately or else Logo Timeline will be shut down. We fix it by doing the following:
- If you've been copying without giving credit, stop immediately. Do not copy any more items unless you put in the edit summary where you got it from. A link to the source website is the better and official way to copy.
- Fill out the edit summary every time you make an edit, regardless of if you were copying or not.
- If you copied before, go back to those pages and put in a note, a link or an edit summary to say where it was copied from.
You can put the Attrib template at the top of the page a general indicator that you think something was copied. - Instead of copying from another wiki, do your own research. You still need to credit where you got your info even if it's not from another wiki. Same thing you had to do when you wrote a book report in school.
- Any pages not identified as being copied by Sunday, March 12, 2023 with have an attribution notice added to them, regardless of whether or not they actually were copied. The notice will say that at least some of the material came from another wiki, most likely Logopedia, and the notice can never be removed.
What if you don't want to?
If you decide you're not going to do this, then you just decided to help force this wiki to close.
If you decide to leave instead of doing this, that is also a decision to help force this wiki to close because you don't want to fix a problem you likely helped create. A lot of people have been plagiarizing by copying from Logopedia without saying so.
If you decide this is no big deal and you're going to keep on copying from other wikis without saying so, you will be blocked for three days. If it happens again, it will be a week. The blocks will get longer from there, including being permanently blocked. This goes into effect the moment I put the announcement of this blog on each person's page so they can't say they weren't told.
Any attempts to remove the attribution notice will also result in being blocked, for the same amount of time.
This isn't an exaggeration. I've seen what happens when formal complaints are made. This has to be done. A deadline hasn't been specified, but the moment I was notified on March 1st, the clock started ticking.
Other problems to be fixed
While we're fixing this, there's at least two other things that need to be fixed:
- Things that are not logos.
- Whether this wiki should close anyway.
There may be more, but we'll start with these.
Not a logo or variation
The picture to the right is on the "Credit Variants" page for Glen Glenn Sound. It shows the names of three companies. They are not a logo for any of the three companies, and they are not variations on logos. It's a list of three companies because their names are displayed in the same font used for the job description and names of four people who worked on the movie.
Don't add these any more and try to say they're a logo. To be a logo or a variation of a logo, the name has to be distinctly different than the rest of what's there.
Should the wiki close anyway?
I know some of you are refugees from Logopedia. Maybe you got blocked there, or maybe you just like it better here. Others found this wiki on their own.
Whatever the reason that brought you here, once we get the plagiarism fixed, we need to take a look at whether it is practical to keep Logo Timeline open. There's several factors working against it:
- Logo Timeline is less than 4% of the size of Logopedia, yet covers the same subject as Logopedia.
- This wiki was created when a person got blocked on Logopedia and decided to make their own wiki about logos.
- Over the years, even before plagiarism became a problem, a lot came from Logopedia.
- Though I do have some interest in the artistry of logos as they change over time, it's not a strong area of interest right now. I actually only got involved in this wiki to stop vandalism.
With a much smaller size and a lot of overlap with Logopedia, eventually Logo Timeline will be subject to a duplicate wiki review. In order to survive, Logo Timeline needs to have something distinctively different that Logopedia doesn't have. Something that makes people say, "It's worthwhile to be here."
Without that something different, justifying keeping this wiki open is more difficult. If you have ideas on what that could be, especially if you're willing to lead the way to put them into effect, leave them in the comments below.