User blog:Evilquoll/Copying from Wikipedia

I have come across far too many articles on this wiki which have been incompetently copied from Wikipedia. Said incompetence usually takes both of two forms:

The page text is derived from the rendered HTML of the Wikipedia article. This is mind-boggling as copying the MediaWiki source code directly not only gives better results, it is actually a lot easier. Converting the HTML back to MediaWiki results in errors such as the article having two tables of contents (one copied, one generated) or "references" linking back to the Wikipedia original (which is no longer guaranteed to match them) instead of being in-page.

The article is copied without attribution. This is serious as the Wikipedia licence is CC-BY-SA, not just CC; by failing to add the tag (which is available in the "more +" menu at the top of the edit window) to the copied article, you are failing to comply with the BY-SA part of of the licence, and are thus violating Wikipedia's copyright; and if you live in the UK, the EU or the USA, you are thus committing a crime under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, the Copyright Directive or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act respectively. (Even if the urban myth that "copyright violation is 'only' a civil offence" were still true, the fact would remain that it is an offence, and thus not something that any decent person should even think for a moment of doing.)