Talk:Thomas L. Sloan

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 11 January 2021 and 21 April 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Tannermday.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 04:18, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Copyright

(moved here from my talk Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 17:43, 17 October 2014 (UTC))Thank you for your review of the Sloan article. May I respectfully submit that http://www.fofweb.com/History/MainPrintPage.asp?iPin=ENAIT467&DataType=Indian draws almost all of its information from Hazel W. Hertzberg, "The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements", (1971). The copywritten "web article" has parroted Hertzberg without reference and added a copyright to it, while I have directly cited and credited the direct source of the information. Hertzberg is the preeminent source of information on the history of the Society of American Indians and of Sloan. While I have a copy of Hertzberg, it is also available on the web at http://books.google.com/books?id=nuYACtGWDiQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=hertzberg+hazel+american+indian+identity&hl=en&sa=X&ei=1CFBVNbcJfSTsQS164D4Cg&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=hertzberg%20hazel%20american%20indian%20identity&f=false, and checking the references and page citations will corroborate my position. In addition, when I revised the article upon request, I deleted all information from the "web article" where I found no independent source. The rest of the "web article" is totally Hertzberg's material. In sum, the "web article" added a copyright to information taken from Hertzberg without sourcing the reference, and I have used nothing from the web article. I therefore respectfully request that you reconsider your position for resolution. Thank you for your kind consideration. Richlevine00 (talk) 14:34, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for this. I do see that that there's a lot of similarity between the two. But let's be clear: the initial version of this article used whole chunks of the website with only minimal changes. For example, this passage from our article:

As a teenager, Sloan worked as a herder for white cattlemen who leased grazing lands on the reservation. In fall 1880, the 17-year-old Sloan came upon some members of the Omaha Indian Council discussing how little they had received for the past season's grazing. Sloan knew the exact number of steers on the land, since he and another herder had just counted them. Realizing that there was a big discrepancy between the number he had reported to the agent and the money the latter had paid the owners was one-sixth or less of what they were due. Sloan immediately complained to the Commissioner of Indian affairs commissioner and the Secretary of the Department of the Interior. Attempts were made to silence him. He was heckled, abused, and sentenced on trumped-up charges to 30 days in the agency blockhouse. There he found himself in company with another objector, Hiram Chase, son and grandson of Omaha chiefs.

differs from this, from the website:

As a teenager, Sloan worked as a herder for white cattlemen who leased grazing lands on the reservation. In fall 1880, the 17-year-old Sloan came upon some members of the Omaha Indian Council discussing how little they had received for the past season's grazing. Sloan knew the exact number of steers on the land, since he and another herder had just counted them. Realizing that there was a big discrepancy between the number he had reported to the agent and the money the latter had paid the owners—one-sixth or less of what they were due—Sloan immediately complained to the Indian affairs commissioner and the interior secretary. Attempts were made to silence him. He was heckled, abused, and even sentenced on trumped-up charges to 30 days in the agency blockhouse. There he found himself in company with another objector, Hiram Chase, son and grandson of Omaha chiefs.

largely in the introduction of some grammatical errors. That part isn't in the book, and seems to have been removed from the current version of the article – thank you. Other phrases in the article seem to come directly from the book: "When Sloan returned to the reservation after graduation" is in our article, but not the website. The thing is, it doesn't matter if stuff is taken from the book or the website, or if the website took from the book; what matters is that we can't have it in our article. You are welcome to start on a rewrite; but please don't copy any existing content over to the new page, to avoid the risk of introducing copyright material. The page will probably be looked at in 7–10 days. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 17:43, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. As a point of clarification, are you telling me that I may not use the referenced Hertzberg materials because they were subsequently copywritten by the on-line website? Richlevine00 (talk) 18:08, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Richlevine00, you are welcome to use the book or the website or any other reliable source as a source. That means you can look at it, see what it says, and use that information to write your own text here; you can also freely cite it in inline footnotes. You can use the meaning, the facts and ideas, of the text, and cite it to say that you have done so. What you can't do, in almost all cases, is re-use the exact form of words of the source. You can't copy the actual words written in the book, you must write your own text with the same meaning. I see from your user page that you have a legal background, so you probably know this stuff far better than I do. The problem here is not that a website copied some stuff from a book, the problem is that some parts of our article have the same form of words as previously published text which belongs to someone else, and that, technically, puts Wikipedia on the wrong side of the law. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 21:09, 17 October 2014 (UTC) Hi. I have another revision of our article for your review at User:Richlevine00/sandbox5. Thank you. Richlevine00 (talk) 19:19, 18 October 2014 (UTC)