from wikiHow – The How to Manual That You Can Edit
Google provides several sources of useful information for wikiHow editors and patrollers. Google search can be used to quickly and easily test suspect articles for copyright violations, and can also be used to determine whether the subject of a “Be Like” article is sufficiently notable to be a useful wikiHow article. In addition, Google Suggest also provides a way to determine what the best title for an article should be. This article will provide a reference for using these Google tools on wikiHow.
Steps
Testing for Copyright Violations
- Look for new articles or unformatted articles that appear to be copy and pasted from another source. New “copy and paste jobs” generally tend to stick out like a sore thumb on wikiHow as they will not closely fit our how-to format.
- Do a “Google Test” by taking a selection of 5-20 words of the suspected copyrighted submission, and enter it into a google search box with quotes around it. By entering the selection of words in quotes, Google will locate any other document on the Internet with those exact same words.
- If no matches come up, then the document is probably not a copy and paste from a copyrighted source on the web.
- If Google shows one or more matches for the search, then look at the document to see if it is the source of the submission on wikiHow. The image below shows an exact match of two full sentences between a wikiHow article and another article. This almost certainly indicates that one was copied from the other.
- If the page appears to be non-unique, mark it as a suspected copyright violation by writing {{copyvio|URL of source}} and blanking out all the text.
- If the URL uses PHP or otherwise does not render properly on the template after posting, you may use {{copyvio2}}. Be sure to post the questioned URL on the corresponding discussion page.
- For more information on dealing with potential copyright violations, read How to Remove Copyright Violations from wikiHow.
Testing for Notability
- Copy the name of the person whose notability is questionable. If you encounter a “Be Like” article where you do not instantly recognize the name, you should apply this test.
- Search for that person’s name and look to see where it comes up.
- Search results that may support notability:
- If the person has an entry about them on Wikipedia
- If the person has an entry about them on IMDB
- If the person is prominently featured in a major newspaper or magazine (e.g., The New York Times, Time, Newsweek).
- Search results that do not support notability:
- If the person has a MySpace page.
- If the person has YouTube videos.
- If the person is on Buzznet or any other social network.
- Use your best judgment in scrutinizing these articles; if the target of the article does not appear to be someone widely known with achievements other than merely creating internet buzz, he or she does not probably pass the notability requirement.
- Nominate articles that are not about sufficiently notable figures as vanity pages. This process may encourage a helpful discussion as to whether the article’s subject is sufficiently notable as to warrant inclusion in wikiHow.
Researching the Article Titles
- Research title ideas to determine which one is most commonly searched. There are two tools that can be used to figure out which phrases people are searching for:
- Google Suggest. Check your title ideas with Google Suggest or the Google Toolbar search box:
- In the example given here, the editor is looking for a good title for a wikiHow on “drifting a car”. The editor types in “how to drift” into the Google toolbar and Google suggests several searches with those words. The phrase at the top of the list is the most commonly searched.
- This inquiry shows that “How to Drift a Car” is more likely to be searched–and is therefore more likely to be found by people who seek these instructions–than, for example, “How to Drift in a Car” which is lower down the list.
- Pay no attention to the number of results on the right side of the phrase. The phrases that are most frequently searched are listed at the top, and the lower you go down the list, the fewer people are searching it on Google.
- Choose the phrase that’s highest on the list while still fitting the content of the article appropriately.
- Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This tool is more complex but can be useful when dealing with more diverse phrases.
- Visit the Google AdWords Keyword Tool if the phrases you’re considering don’t start off similarly, which is what is necessary to use Google Suggest as a comparison tool. For example, which of the following phrases is more popular?
- How to make a website
- How to create a website
- How to make a webpage
- How to create a webpage
- Type in all of the phrases in the search box, as shown. Type in the captcha security code, if necessary (you normally only need to do it for your first query). Press the “Get Keyword Ideas” button.
- Scroll down to see the list that’s generated. Click on the “Avg Search Volume” heading (circled in red in the image) so that the phrases are re-ordered with the most commonly searched phrase at the top of the list.
- When the phrases are ordered so that the ones with the highest average search volume are at the top, choose the phrase that’s highest on the list while still fitting the content of the article appropriately. In this case, that’s “How to make a website”.
Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Do a Google Test. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.
Tags: copyright·Testing·Violations
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from wikiHow – The How to Manual That You Can Edit
Have you ever uploaded an image or a video to a website, only for it to be deleted because of copyright issues? While some areas of copyright law can be complicated enough to cause copyright lawyers sleepless nights, the basics are very simple. Armed with some simple principles, you can save yourself from running afoul of copyright law.
Steps
- Understand the scope of copyright law. It does protect literary works, paintings, photographs, drawings, films, music (and its lyrics), choreography, sculptures and many other things. It generally doesn’t protect the underlying ideas, and it does not protect facts. For example, copyright doesn’t prevent you from expressing in your own words ideas and facts found in a book or journal you read (but if you do so without attribution to the original author you may be guilty of plagiarism).
- Understand that nearly everything on the Internet, and everywhere else, is copyrighted, by default. “I found it on the Internet” is not a defense against copyright infringement; works on the Internet are as copyrightable as any other kind of work. Nor is “it didn’t say it was copyrighted”. In nearly all jurisdictions (including the United States, and all other Berne Convention signatories), it is not necessary for a work to have an explicit copyright notice for it to be copyrighted.[1] It is also not necessary for copyright in a work to be registered; this simply makes it easier to be compensated in court. Without an explicit dedication to the public domain, assume that it is still under copyright.There is a quirk in the United States’ implementation of the Berne Convention: works first published before 1978 without a copyright notice may be public domain in the United States.[2]
- Understand the difference between copyrights, trademarks, and other forms of “intellectual property.” The term “intellectual property” itself, and the kind of thinking it encourages, has led to these very different things being confused with each other.[3] Trademarks, for example, forbid using certain words, marks, symbols, and so on within certain contexts, to protect consumers from misrepresentation. Copyright would not prevent you from, for example, writing some new text editor software and calling it “Microsoft Text Editor”, but trademark law would.
- Understand that one does not get a copyright without some creativity. If ever you wonder whether a certain action would infringe on the copyright of someone else, the question to ask is: is this a creative work on my count, or am I simply drawing from the creativity of someone else? Lunches, as any economist would tell you, are not free. Some examples:
- Scanning something yourself does not, by itself, give you a new copyright over anything. You cannot scan a photograph from, say, a magazine and then put it on the Internet; the copyright would still reside with the author of the work. The flip-side of this is that scanning a work which is in the public domain would not, in many jurisdictions, give you the copyright over the resulting scan.
- Taking a screenshot of a video or a computer program does not generate a new copyright. This would be a derivative work of the video or computer program.
- Some non-creative things are not copyrightable, for example, a plain text logo in a generic font. Neither are simple geometric shapes. But don’t rely on this unless you are certain.
- Learn about the public domain laws for your jurisdiction. “Public domain” is short-hand for “uncopyrighted”, not “publicly distributed”. A work can be out of copyright due to age, by the nature of authorship, or other reasons. In the United States, all works authored by a federal government (not state government!) employee during the course of their official duties are public domain, as are all works published before 1923. Works first created in the European Union will usually be copyrighted until 70 years after the death of the author.
- Understand what “fair use” is, and what it isn’t. Called “fair dealing” in many jurisdictions, fair use is simply a guarantee that copyright laws do not infringe freedom of speech and make critical commentary impossible. It permits, for example, limited quoting of copyrighted material. In some jurisdictions, it would allow creating a copy for personal use (such as a backup). It is not a blank cheque granting you a right to do anything at all and call it “fair use”. Fair use is an extremely complex body of case law; it is often very difficult for non-lawyers to tell in advance whether or not a certain use will be considered fair use in court. If in doubt, seek permission first.[4]
- Understand the law about derivative works as pertains to fiction. It was said above that “ideas cannot be copyrighted”. This is not entirely true; fictional characters,[5] story-lines, and settings[6] can be copyrighted. This means that fan-fiction, drawings of characters from copyrighted works, and so on are all technically copyright infringements. Sometimes copyright holders turn a blind eye to this sort of thing, but unless it has been explicitly authorised, don’t count on this being the case.
Tips
- Follow the spirit of the law, rather than the letter. Not only is this good form, it works in your favour: chances are slim that any “loophole” you find is not something that hasn’t been done to death in the courts already. If it has not, chances are much better that a court would rule against you.
- The Wikimedia Commons maintain an extensive summary of public domain legislation from all over the world.
Sources and Citations
- ? Stim 2005, p. 257. “[T]he Berne Convention [...] specifies that no formalities—such as copyright notice—are necessary for gaining [copyright] protection.”
- ? Scott §2.42[E]. “A work published prior to January 1, 1978 [...] without the prescribed copyright notice or with a defective notice was injected into the public domain, and the author lost all copyright protection.”
- ? As Richard Stallman says, “Non-lawyers who hear one term applied to these various laws tend to assume they are based on a common principle, and function similarly. Nothing could be further from the case. These laws originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues.”
- ? Hoffman, Fair Use: Further issues. “Fair use is at best an “iffy” defense and there is virtually no way that anyone can say, in advance, whether the defense will be successful. Thus, in any instance, the best and most advisable course of action is to license materials.”
- ? Stim 2007, p. 205.
- ? To quote Chilling Effects, “What if these worlds were elaborately filled with details? [...] [N]ormal plots like boy-meets-girl cannot be copyrighted [...] but the more detailed the plot is, the more it becomes protectible expression.”
Article provided by wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Understand Copyright Basics. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.
Tags: copyright·infringement·Internet·Trademarks
