Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/The Fly II


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: keep. Fys. &#147;Ta fys aym&#148;. 11:55, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

The Fly II
Text was copied from the corresponding Wikipedia article (and was then removed from that page) without any attribution as required by the GFDL. —LrdChaos (talk) 23:10, 31 July 2007 (UTC) * Delete unless or until someone properly sources the content. The articles needs more than just attribution to Wikipedia. It needs reliable sources and an intro that explains why this film and these quotes are remarkable. FloNight 11:52, 1 August 2007 (UTC) Keep now that entry is properly attributed. FloNight 20:38, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Vote closed: Result: Keep. Fys. &#147;Ta fys aym&#148;. 11:55, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete . ~ UDScott 00:54, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep now that Phaedriel has cleaned up the page and properly added quotes. Thanks Phaedriel! ~ UDScott 12:42, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep. The wikipedia history shows the editor was just trying to do the right thing. I did the same thing once, without knowing better. Why don't we just provide the correct attribution? Besides, if we delete the page, shouldn't we restore the quotes to the WP page? Won't that be more trouble than just letting UDScott's cleaned-up version stand? --Ubiquity 11:46, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete annoying though this is the issue needs addressing and because of "copy and paste" this is not GDFL and so is unacceptable -- Herby talk thyme 11:59, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep. Entry fixed; sources added; formatting corrected. Phaed r i e l  - 12:14, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment. While Phaedriel's efforts have improved the quality of the page, the bulk of the content is still from the Wikipedia article and still lacks attribution (I'm not sure what is meant by "sources added"). —LrdChaos (talk) 12:50, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm truly sorry, dear LrdChaos; but I really can't see what this article's missing now to be acceptable. The material is not from Wikipedia, but from IMDb, btw; which is linked to from the entry itself. Best regards, Phaed r i e l  - 12:55, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, then Wikipedia had a copyvio of IMDb, which is now stuck over here. (If you compare the version before blanking with the most recent version, the quotes are the same. The formatting might be different, but the substance is identical.) We've deleted pages before for just being copied from IMDb, and I don't think that this one should be any exception. —LrdChaos (talk) 13:04, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Help this newbie over here understand this... IMDb owns the copyrights of material from movies, made by studios that hold no association whatsoever with it, then? Or does it rely on Fair Use to provide said quotes, which seems the case to me, in which case there's no way an actual "copyvio" can take place when reproducing the quotes listed by them? Point aside, a brief perusal of at least 15 entries on movies I just performed shows exactly the same pattern: using IMDb as the only source for the provided quotes. In that sense, this entry doesn't appear to have any issues that a great percentage of other ones also present. Last but not least, I understand that deletion of verbatim copies of IMDb entries may well be in order; but this isn't the case, as the intro has been reworded. Phaed r i e l  - 12:55, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
 * The risk of copying material from IMDb is that there's no guarantee that the content there accurately reflects the content of the film, since it's added by users and often done by recollection. While neither IMDb nor it users hold any copyright to the content from the film, the users/IMDb (depending on what sort of agreement is in place regarding copyright and user contributions) have copyright for any original content they create, including misremembered lines. This is usually a bigger problem for films with much larger quote sections at IMDb, but it can affect smaller ones as well. Basically, there are two problems with Wikiquote using material from IMDb: 1) IMDb is not a reliable source for quotes (it may be right, but there's no way to know), and 2) because of the potential for original content to exist at IMDb, there's a potential for copyright violation. I know I've been pressing the latter, but the former (reliability of sources) is perhaps the bigger concern. Unfortunately, there's no way, short of manually checking every page and watching every film, for anyone to really verify the correctness of the quotes here, or to see if they've been copied from IMDb. However, I strongly believe that we should discourage the use of IMDb as a source for quotes, due to its unreliability. —LrdChaos (talk) 13:32, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Hence, the issue is far more serious than I originally thought and the need for a clarifying debate is urgent; because I see that, indeed, the criteria "Delete as copyvio of IMDb quote page" has been used as grounds for deletion in the past . Yet, we agree that a transcript of the quotes themselves from IMDb (reliability notwithstanding) can't technically incur in a copyright infringement, since since IMDb doesn't hold copyright over the contents of the movies, as you said yourself (unless it can be established that the IMDb user who posted the quotes in the first place has actually misquoted them, thus creating an "original work"). The acknowledged idea that sourcing our entries upon quotes provided by IMDb (or, in fact, any other website/book/etc that isn't the original work itself) consists in a derivative work that falls under the same Fair Use criteria by which they're provided at their entry, effectively rules out the possibility of copyright violation. Now, I see that our entries for a huge number of highly notable movies have been directly built upon their IMDb counterparts; some of them even use it as only source (Chariots of Fire, Fiddler on the Roof, Anna and the King, Fight Club and the list goes on and on). Are these articles to be deleted then? I don't see the reason why. Yet by the same criteria that was used to delete others in the past, they certainly could. An unequivocal debate that settles this highly important issue is sorely needed, in my humble opinion. And I still believe we should keep this, btw. <font color="#009900">P<font color="#00AA00">h<font color="#00BB00">a<font color="#00CC00">e<font color="#00DD00">d r i e l  - 19:22, 1 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Keep. It should not be hard to copy Wikipedia edit history here. I do the same thing on Commons when noticing original uploading logs not transwikied.--Jusjih 14:51, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment: In September 2005, Bark probably copied the quotes from imdb to the wikipedia article, under the banner of "beefing it up" (we don't actually know for sure that's what he did, but it would certainly be an amazing coincidence if he just happened to pick those three bits of dialog, down to the punctuation, himself). The quotes stand untouched, their right to exist unimpugned for almost two years, until Bignole decides they belong in wikiquote. He duly creates a page, neglecting to acknowledge the WP origin (which may be OK anyway since the material was cribbed from imdb in the first place). The page is messy, but UDScott takes a crack at it, followed by Phaedriel, so now we have a page that follows guidelines. So what is the problem? Is it the missing acknowledgement? Easily fixed. Is it our possible copyright infringement of imdb? No, because even though we are fair use copying the same quotes they are, that doesn't infringe on them unless we copy their entire page, and Phaedriel has fixed that (that is, made our page a "derivative work") by making the WQ page quite different from the imdb page. Is it the general unreliability of imdb? Possibly, but ALL transcription is inherently unreliable, and the beauty of wiki is that if someone ever finds the quote and knows it's wrong, they can fix it. (I must admit that this last argument is a little weak until someone who has actually seen the movie can step forward to say he or she heard the same quotes. Any such person out there?). Is the problem the redundancy of the material with that of imdb? Again, possibly, but we know there are millions of quotes in WQ that could also be found elsewhere by dedicated web trawlers, so that doesn't seem to be the problem either. If Bignole had asked for advice before proceeding, we might have advised him to proceed differently, but that's water under the bridge. At this point I don't see what's wrong with the page as it stands. Whew! --Ubiquity 18:46, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep I'm unsure on this, but I don't think we can delete pages like this for being WP or IMDB copyvios, as they don't hold the copyright to the quotes. There might be something in the order that might shoot itself in the foot, but if we keep the history somewhere, I think it's fine. Will {{sup|{talk)}} 20:12, 1 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete unless substantially changed to avoid presentation copyright violation, which Phaedriel's otherwise excellent work has not altered. The current content is obviously taken from IMDb. It's not just the punctuation, it's the context lines, which copy the wording (not part of the original film) and follow even more rigid (and recognizable) formats than ours. Although the original quotes themselves cannot be copyrighted by a derivative-work publisher like IMDb, the selection of and errors within these quotes, plus the non-quote material so obviously copied straight from the source, do put us in violation of the presentation copyright that IMDb holds for its collection. This is why we have started copyvio-tagging and deleting articles found to be doing this.
 * A better solution, of course, is to fix the article. The way I've recommended to many in the past to fix these obvious IMDb copyvios is to:
 * Watch the film or TV show. Fix the existing ones, collect new ones, and delete whatever isn't especially memorable or otherwise useful for Wikiquote's text-only approach. (This eliminates IMDb's claim to selection.)
 * Organize the quotes in chronological order. (IMDb quotes are almost never in order, so this is a major value-add for Wikiquote.)
 * Reformat the remaining quotes, and rewrite, reformat, expand on, and/or delete the context information, per Wikiquote guidelines. This eliminates the presentation copyvio.
 * Basically, this approach is the same we might use to collect primary-source material, except that we use sources like IMDb for raw quote text to speed the editing process. Since the quote wording is not copyrightable, we can hope that this will make any complaint against us extremely unlikely.
 * Unfortunately, the handful of editors doing this copyright-reviewing cannot be expected to fix every article in this way, which is why the copyvio-flagging and deletion is becoming more common as we start working on our severe backlog of these articles.
 * The basic problem we face with these articles is the one we face for just about every Wikiquote problem. We cannot propose practices that require thousands of editor-hours of work unless and until we can get our regular, Wikiquote-experienced editors to actually do the work. Whenever we can't expect this work to be done, we must have a backup plan that can be handled by our 10-20 frequent editors. (See these en:WQ statistics for an ongoing assessment of who we have editing, and much more info.) VfD'ing obvious IMDb copvios (how's that for jargon?) is an effective alternative until we can get more eyeballs and fingers on this widespread problem. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 21:08, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Dear Jeff, thank you so much for taking the time to write such an exhaustive, detailed explanation, which I suspect we all needed, given the mixture of beliefs everyone, specially me, expressed above. I wish to emphasize two words you've mentioned above as the core of the issue: presentation copyright. While it was clear that the use the quotes themselves would not qualify as a copyvio, the (now evident to me, thanks to you!) fact that the presentation itself would, never crossed my mind - and again, I suspect most of us here will learn from your explanation. With this clear idea in mind now, I've taken the liberty of expanding this entry with a little more material, as well as organizing the quotes chronologically as you suggested. I hope this suffices now. To end this, I fully support the idea of rethinking the References system for films and TV shows. If I can be of assistance in the task, I'll be glad to help. Best regards, <font color="#009900">P<font color="#00AA00">h<font color="#00BB00">a<font color="#00CC00">e<font color="#00DD00">d r i e l  - 01:17, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Believe it or not, there's a lot more I can write about the pitfalls of presentation copyrights. Basically, anything that isn't verifiable, unconstestable quote content puts a presentation "stamp" on a dialog transcription. That includes:
 * Arguable punctuation variations (e.g., colons vs. semicolons vs. emdashes to connect related sentences, quotes vs. surrounding asterisks vs. italics for emphasis, use of ellipses).
 * Wording of context lines and stage directions.
 * Errors, both accidental and deliberate. In fact, intentional minor errors in dictionaries and encyclopedias are a favorite means for professional publishers to identify presentation copyright violators.
 * The extent of a quote can be telling as well. IMDb frequent includes long tracts of conversation, whereas we try to focus on the pithiest parts. Therefore, our efforts to trim quotes to their essences not incidentally also dodges the copyvio bullet.
 * I've done two edits of the article to illustrate technical formatting changes (like puncutation tweaks and context rewording) and removing less-than-compelling material. These aren't just tricks to avoid copyio, but actually follow our established practices, so we have solid ground to stand on. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:28, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep now, after Phaedriel's reformatting and addition, and my pruning. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 00:23, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment about sourcing: We have a convention for "sourcing" quotes from films and TV shows that is substantially different from those from people and other creative works. We have implicitly assumed that much of our mainstream audiovisual (A/V) media articles either can or eventually will be sourced by their DVD or VHS prints. (We rarely if ever cite these as sources, which we probably should change by adding lines in the "References" section, perhaps like I did for Firefly (TV series).) For TV shows, by grouping quotes by episode, we identify a fairly specific source, and the chronological order of quotes within an episode or film, plus a scene-description context line, can be considered a rough substitute for a page number. (Timecodes are a more direct substitute for books' page numbers, but the variety of actual sources people use for quoting — original televised or screened presentation; DVD and/or VHS, sometimes having different editions; time- and/or content-edited telecasts, etc. — make this somewhat impractical.) But we don't cite any secondary source like IMDb as a reference (i.e., reliable source) for quotes. Our IMDb links have traditionally been provided as a convenience. They originally went to the film or show's main article, like Wikipedia, but we later changed the imdb title template to jump directly to IMDb quote pages. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but perhaps we should reconsider it, since it can give false impressions and lead to easy copvios. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 21:33, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep The issue is not how we got to this article, but is it valid now.--Poetlister 17:11, 3 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep I don't see it as a copyvio (kick me if I'm wrong).--Cato 00:05, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep (as nom), now that the page is substantially changed. The discussion about transwiki, the GFDL, and Wikiquote continues at the Village Pump. —LrdChaos (talk) 14:37, 5 August 2007 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.