A lobster waiting to find its place into its new home, a Wikipedia article

Background: Wikipedia copyrights[edit]

When you make an edit you are releasing your work for anyone to copy and use – most editors know that. But while many editors don't sweat the details, in fact their work is not being released outright into the public domain. Rather, it remains under copyright but is licensed, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. While this license is very lax, it is still a license of copyrighted material, and contains this key clause:

"Attribution—You must attribute the work [to Wikipedia]."

There are number of good reasons for this:

And there are probably other benefits.

Unfortunately, however, a lot of downstream sites don't properly attribute. In fact, most probably don't.

We have on occasion gotten into circular-referencing trap, where a Wikipedia article is unwittingly being sourced to a Wikipedia mirror. Even harder to detect is when a source considered somewhat reliable is itself sourced to a Wikipedia mirror, with the attribution being lost at one or both steps. It is a problem.

The Wikimedia Foundation has neither the desire, motive, nor resources to do anything about this. This is probably proper, given the Foundation's overarching mission to gather and freely disseminate knowledge, without overly worrying about details. Unlike a normal publisher, we stand no pecuniary loss from this practice, nor could we collect any monetary damages from a lawsuit.

That's fine, but it does throw the search for a solution back to the individual Wikipedias.

Solution: copyright trap[edit]

So what to do?

Well, publishers have been wresting with this exact question for many decades, and a very common and widespread solution they have come up with is the fictitious entry. From that article:

Fictitious or fake entries are deliberately incorrect entries in reference works... Fictitious entries are included... as a copyright trap to reveal subsequent plagiarism or copyright infringement.

Various manifestations of this are trap streets in atlases, and ghost words in dictionaries.

It is just for this reason that the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia contains a fictitious entry on Lillian Virginia Mountweazel. The owners of the New Columbia could, if they suspected a competitor was stealing their work, search for Mountweazel. Finding her entry quickly and incontrovertibly established the work as plagiarism. Similarly, the 1978–1979 edition of the official State of Michigan map included the fictitious town Beatosu and Goblu. The 2001 The New Oxford American Dictionary included a definition for the nonexistent word "esquivalience" – and so forth, with many other respected reference works following this practice.

Under this policy, if adopted, then Wikipedia would also do this. The chosen method is to include the word "lobster" (or "lobsters") in every article. The word is uncommon enough to show up naturally in few places, yet mundane enough to be passed over by most plagiarists. A simple text search on the word will thus, in most cases, quickly reveal if any given material was copied verbatim from the Wikipedia.

Text of the proposed policy[edit]

The proposed policy is probably one of the simplest and most straightforward seen here: it is simply

All Wikipedia articles shall contain the word "lobster" or "lobsters".

Guidelines for use[edit]

Some articles (Flapjack, Keith Nugent, etc.) already contain the word "lobster"; no change is required for those articles. For other articles (Gloucester, Massachusetts, Bottom dweller, etc.) it can be worked in fairly easily. However, some other articles (List of parliamentary boroughs and associated county constituencies 1832–1918, High-energy nuclear physics, others) more care is required in implementing this new policy.

When working the word "lobster" into an article, care should be taken to disturb the existing material little as possible. Statements requiring references should be avoided, or if used, references should be provided.

In the examples below, bolding is used to show differences; the indicated text is not to be actually bolded in the article.

Incontrovertible statements

It's usually best to include incontrovertible statements not requiring references:





(In the last instance, "may or may not" covers all possibilities, so no reference is required. For the other examples, the added statement is true on its face or may be quickly deduced from existing referenced material already in the article, and so does not require a reference.)

Interjections

When adding incontrovertible statements is seen as impinging too much on the article text, editors may wish add short interjections instead. These do not necessarily have to have anything to do with the gist of the article, but only serve to implement the policy as transparently as possible:


Interpolations

Editors may also wish to insert the word directly into the text. This requires less work and less change to the body text of the article, although some readers may stumble over the word (but most will probably not notice it):


Replacement

Finally, some articles are improved by just replacing the article text with sufficient instances of the term "lobster" to fill out the article. Taking Arboretum du Massif des Agriers as an example, the article reads in its entirety:

First of all, it's not even in America – it's in one of those foreign countries ("France") apparently, so who needs it? Second of all, it is 4 hectares, which nobody knows what a hectare is (but "4" of anything sounds small). Third of all, it's just some trees (and not many of those), which don't even do anything. They just stand there. So who wants to read about that? All in all, the best course for articles like this is to simply replace all the text, like this:

See also: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

Exception[edit]

The sole exception to this rule is, of course, the article Lobster which for obvious reasons should not contain the word "lobster" (except in the title).

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