All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXII

[GethN7]

She's certainly not the sole author by any means, but if it's true it might explain why she rewrote the main text and brought over only a subset of the page's tropes.  Unfortunately, my limited access to TVT's history doesn't clarify matters.

EDIT:  Okay, Hepzibah's claiming to be TVT user "foxley".  Can whoever it was who still had a live TVT account check the full history for the Miss Fisher show and see what foxley's done on it?

Meanwhile, we need to come up with some kind of protocol for actually verifying stuff like this.  As I noted in my comment to Hepzibah, I think this is the first time we've asked for verification and the user in question hasn't disappeared from the knowledge of Man.  We've never actually needed to confirm a claim before now, and we need to figure out how to do it for the future -- if we don't simply go on the honor system.

EDIT 2:  We need to make it clearer somewhere that in cases like this the user needs to put their copyright claim in the edit reason.  Exactly where, I don't know.  Right on the edit page, perhaps?

Foxley checks out. They did write nigh all the page and what they ported over appears to match their edits.

I have also, on behalf of ATT, sent Fighteer a polite message that reads as follows:

Subject: Would like to make a request to make catching plagiarism easier

---

On behalf of All The Tropes, I'd like to ask if TV Tropes could make page histories (not page sources, we need only editing histories for plagiarism checking purposes) visible to non-users. We get some people who claim to be certain tropers porting over their edits, and a few have turned out to partially lie (claiming they are bringing over all their own work when they did not make the original edits, only select revisions) or willing to utterly lie (saying it's all theirs, and when pressed they tend to ghost on us when we demand they provide proof).

We use the Moderation extension, which allows holding edits in a queue before approval, only disabling this for trusted users, and being able to examine page histories would allow us to filter out possible plagiarism more effectively without compromising anything important, to my knowledge, on TV Tropes' end. Other websites besides ours may also benefit from being able to check such information to screen for plagiarism as well.

I understand this decision is likely not yours alone to make, so I respectfully request you present it to your fellow staff members or whomever you need to if such is required.

Note: I'm the only ATT staff member with an account here, and since other staff either have no interest in making an account here or were banned long ago and have no intention of returning, I ask the above so we can avoid legal troubles more effectively.


UPDATE: Fighteer got back to me, and his response was that we'd need to speak to the owners of the site (like Drew) over this, the decision to not show page histories is due to a CDN caching concern and decisions on that level are above his pay grade. Untill then, unless we have an account (such as yours truly does), the page histories remain behind the login.