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Template:Did you know nominations/Tom Skinner

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The following discussion is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: rejected by Crisco 1492 (talk) 05:01, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
Close paraphrasing

Tom Skinner edit

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  • Comment: expanded from 1.7k to 6.6k

Created/expanded by Grutness (talk). Self nom at 11:55, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

  • Article cites no inline sources, just a reference list at the end. This is against both DYK rule 3 (the hook fact must be cited in the article) and, more seriously, rule 4 (the article must be in policy). It looks like some sentences are also lifted directly from at least one of the sources (I have only done a cursory skim for that). This would need a near-total rewrite to pass. rʨanaɢ (talk) 15:10, 13 September 2011 (UTC)
  • Ok, I checked more closely and found that most of the article was indeed copied word-for-word from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. That doesn't even appear to be a PD source, so in addition to being against DYK rules (which don't allow articles that are just copies of off-wiki public domain text) it seems to be copyvio; I've reverted to the version before expansion. rʨanaɢ (talk) 15:15, 13 September 2011 (UTC)
    • Not one iota of it was "word-for-word" from that source, and your excising has been undone. I spent a long time going through four distinct sources, rewriting and revising the information. Yes, a small amount was taken from the DNZB source, but other information you excised also came from other sources such as the New Zealand book of events and Skinner's biography, and it was all rewritten to such an extent that it passes all academic tests normally applied for copyright violation. I suggest you look more closely before decising that something is "word-for-word", and challenge you to find any instance where there more than three or four words together which are the same as in any of those original sources. I would also like an apology, given that my standards as an editor and professional writer have been impugned.
You're joking, right? Here are just a sampling of plagiarized sentences in the version of the article I reviewed
  • Article: Skinner was heavily involved in many community organisations, among them the New Zealand Coastguard Service and the New Zealand Institute for the Blind.

    Source: Skinner was involved in several community organisations, including the New Zealand Coastguard Service, the New Zealand Institute for the Blind...

  • Article: He was actively involved in rugby league as both a referee and administrator, and was manager of the 1960 New Zealand national rugby league team's tour to Britain.

    Source: He was actively involved in rugby league as a referee and administrator, and was manager of the 1960 New Zealand rugby league team to Britain.

  • Article: In 1940, Skinner was elected secretary of the Auckland branch of the New Zealand Plumbers Union, and soon became involved in several other smaller unions...

    Source: In 1940 Skinner was elected secretary of the Auckland branch of the New Zealand Plumbers Union. He also became secretary of a number of other small unions in Auckland...

  • Article: He largely withdrew from public life after Molly’s death in 1985, and died in Auckland on 11 November 1991.

    Source: He largely withdrew from public life after Molly’s death in 1985 but continued his involvement with the St John Ambulance until 1989. Tom Skinner died in Auckland on 11 November 1991.

These were the first few text snippets I even looked at, so who knows how much more there was.
I see that now you have improved the text very marginally (not, in my opinion, enough to alleviate the plagiarism concern), but close paraphrasing is still a problem. Even where text is not lifted word-for-word from the source, the whole structure of the article mirrors the source, and most paragraphs are just the same text with a few words moved around. (For instance, the paragraph about Jim Knox mirrors the one in the source). Given your obvious unwillingness to work with reviewers to improve this article, it is clearly not appropriate for DYK.
In sum: still fails rʨanaɢ (talk) 02:12, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
No, I'm not joking, though I can see now where your egregious comments came from, and why it seemed like plagiarism. It appears that both DNZB and I must have based our information on the same source, Skinner's autobiography. Several of the lines you point out, I had not even seen in the DNZB article, let alone copied. (It's perhaps not that surprising that Peter Franks and I have similar styles of writing, since we have worked together). Grutness...wha? 03:56, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
That's a rather far-fetched lie. You hadn't cited Skinner's autobiography as a source until long after I pointed out the problems with the article, and the possibility that you and some other author just happened to paraphrase it in the same way is so unlikely I can only conclude that you made that up to avoid admitting that your writing did not meet WP policy. The obvious truth is that you just copied in a bunch of text from that source and went through later on changing a few words here and there—you even acknowledged as much here, where you specifically say you took content from DNZB. When the source is PD that sort of editing is allowed but not encouraged, and when the source is copyrighted that sort of editing is simply unacceptable. rʨanaɢ (talk) 04:41, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
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