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The original name of the book was ''characteristicks'', with a "k".--] (]) 18:53, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
The original name of the book was ''characteristicks'', with a "k".--] (]) 18:53, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
== Concerns about proper attribution ==
I just read this entry all the way through and found it to be delightfully quaint in style. But this raised for me the question of whether it was all actually written by a modern-day Wikipedian, or taken from some old source. I searched for the line "and hence the agreeable feeling with which, notwithstanding all their false taste and their tiresome digressions, they impress the modern reader" in and as you can see, a substantial portion of this article is lifted directly from the 1894 Encyclopedia Britannica.
Now, as this work is clearly long since out of copyright, there is no legal problem here, but there is an ethical problem. While we do have a single footnote to Britannica, to my mind that is not enough. I am unclear at this moment as to what our standard "best practice" is regarding the use of material from old works, so I am not doing anything right away. But soon I think I will add a note saying that much of the article is modified from that work. Is that the right thing to do?--] (]) 14:50, 3 October 2011 (UTC)
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I just read this entry all the way through and found it to be delightfully quaint in style. But this raised for me the question of whether it was all actually written by a modern-day Wikipedian, or taken from some old source. I searched for the line "and hence the agreeable feeling with which, notwithstanding all their false taste and their tiresome digressions, they impress the modern reader" in Google books and as you can see, a substantial portion of this article is lifted directly from the 1894 Encyclopedia Britannica.
Now, as this work is clearly long since out of copyright, there is no legal problem here, but there is an ethical problem. While we do have a single footnote to Britannica, to my mind that is not enough. I am unclear at this moment as to what our standard "best practice" is regarding the use of material from old works, so I am not doing anything right away. But soon I think I will add a note saying that much of the article is modified from that work. Is that the right thing to do?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:50, 3 October 2011 (UTC)
