After some internal discussion with Licensing over backlogged items, the Licensing team is requesting administration to utilize fiat to remove this article as a potentially immediately harmful content, the continued inclusion of which is a liability for the Wiki as a whole, and which violated content guidelines and the Wiki License at the time of its posting.

Edit: After talking with the user, and some discussion, we've been able to connect with the author and put together a better solution that wouldn't require the article to necessarily be deleted. Please consider this request withdrawn.

UncertaintyCrossing

The guide will need to be updated in the wake of various staff proposals regarding the handling of art on the wiki, but it is perfectly serviceable in its current form and will be posted and tagged as a new guide after one week's time unless severe concerns are raised. This thread is intended for staff to be able to read and provide feedback on the guide prior to posting.

This discussion is open to operational staff and above, and JS with captain approval. This thread will be open for one week.

EDIT: Additionally, the page is available for outright deletion. Whichever option is favored by staff is the one that I'll go with here.

A quick google search finds plenty of articles and discussions affirming that un-cited tracing is generally considered art plagiarism, though it can be acceptable if cited and if it is done for personal practice rather than public posting. General guidelines on the subject seem to be as follows:

1. If you are posting artwork publicly you should generally not trace.

2. If you do trace, it is imperative that you cite your source so you aren't passing it off as fully your own work.

3. A sufficiently heavy reference should also be cited (e.g. a dog from a picture translated to drawing that has the same breed, pose, coloring, relative dimensions, and miscellaneous details).

4. Don't trace from for-profit stock photos since those companies are vultures. (this one is more specific to us for legal reasons than it is a general rule)

5. If someone violates these rules, they’ll face disciplinary action equivalent to committing literary plagiarism.

What does everyone think about adding information to this effect to the site rules, should any of these guidelines be excluded or any not listed added, what precise language do you feel should be used, and where do you feel it should be located in the site rules?

Naturally, the ban will be upheld (the user may still appeal in a year) due to the seriousness of plagiarism in a literary community; however, upon reviewing the Site Rules and Guide for Newbies it is understandable how younger authors in particular may not understand/have the foreknowledge of why it's wrong to "borrow" from existing works.

As such, the following changes have been made to make it more immediately and obviously clear that plagiarism is a serious offense:

Please note if there are any disagreements with the above wordings. This thread is mostly for records-keeping.

ETA: noting additional edits:

After a week's worth of discussion, there was little support for removing the exemption of author pages in the deletion policy. As such, this amendment is no longer being considered.

However, there is some favor in removing author pages that no longer meet the requirements for an author page, that being three articles with a rating above -10 for more than 24 hours. It was also brought up removing the ability to vote on author pages in general.

Any thoughts?

Unless anybody has some serious reservations with this, I'll be updating the hub sometime on the 17th with the proposed changes.

JackalRelated

Hello! I sent Modern_Erasmus a PM regarding this, and I was informed that since "this isn’t a rewrite, rather a clarification on plagiarism boundaries, the people to ask would be the staff disciplinary team."

I come to you with a question pertaining a "rewrite" of a concept that was pitched in the forums but never acted on.
In this forum post: http://www.scp-wiki.net/forum/t-4716449 , Rainbowknishes stated their idea for an SCP and an additional plot in a further comment on that post. They appear to have a relevant draft here: http://scp-int-sandbox.wikidot.com/scp-dominoes , but it appears to be completely different in scope: the only thing similar seems to be the "monolithic dominoes". They have not updated the draft in 706 days, and have not been active for another 695. They are not active on-site either, since according to scpper they only have one upvote on December 26, 2017.

I have an idea based off of the concept and plot of the forum post, but with a different spin of things. The only things I would keep in my idea draft are:

The idea of a structure 'towering' over a city. (In my draft, it is a normal-radio tower not unlike London's BT tower. Arguably it is nearly impossible to claim this idea as one's own, but there will be a similar structure so I will include this point for brevity.)
The idea of the tower being assimilated into daily life through media.
"Crazy" people rebelling against the tower.
An agent sent to the city, who eventually decides to go against protocol and bomb the tower.
I know it is plagiarism to use their sandbox draft without permission and I do not intend to do so whatsoever. I have sent them a PM explaining the situation, but it has since been two weeks and I am now fairly sure they are inactive will not respond; thus me asking you to prevent being accused of plagiarism when I do not intend to pass off the work as my own. I am entirely willing to credit the user for the idea in an author post, or even if required I would be willing to give co-authorship credit to the user. I would be hesitant to rework the draft completely, but if that is the only course of action should the author not respond I will be vigilant in doing so.

I am asking the rewrite team (or I can ask official staff if need be) if I am allowed to continue ahead with writing my draft and idea, and if so, what steps I should take in crediting the user for their idea. Thank you.

(Just to reiterate, I WILL NOT be using their sandbox draft at all as that is indeed plagiarism. I only want to use aspects of their SCP idea that they appear to not be using.)

Thank you.

How do we want to proceed?

I am the interim tech team admin contact until Quik returns. Please reach out to me if there are concerns or questions regarding the decision the captain has made.

Members of the rewrite team, and any other volunteers who wish to help, go to this sandbox. When you find an entry you think should be pruned, put a stikethrough around it and a brief description of why you think it should be pruned. I'll be periodically going through and checking the stuck through entries, at which point I'll either delete it or confirm it as staying. Do not delete entries yourselves!

For an example of what this would look like:

Item: SCP-330

Tissue Test record: N/A

Termination Test record: SCP-682 attempted to take some of the contents of SCP-330 but later had its arms torn off. The arms quickly regrew and threw the bowl. SCP-330 was not harmed.
It's low effort and doesn't have a point- Erasmus

If you'll be helping out as a volunteer, please comment below.

In addition, when it comes time for a pruning we'll make the announcement and do the planning here instead of creating different threads for each one.

I'll be looking into filling in the missing data here as I can find it, as well as adding other logs that fall under our jurisdiction. If one of these logs has an active owner or curator that wishes to take official responsibility in lieu of staff, please contact me.

Regarding SCP articles that were never titled, do we want to change their series list names to [UNTITLED] to differentiate them from unoccupied slots? Or some other policy?

So far, it looks like Conwell and I have been handling the majority of it. Given that we should have plenty of mods and admins around to handle doing deletions maybe once a week (and Conwell's in med school and I'm usually bogged down in forum crit), can we maybe have a signup sheet or the like or just two mods/admins assigned to each day so that the workload is better split? I'm happy to still help out with handling a day or two myself.

Plenty of drafts the Forum Crit/butterfly squad team goes through end with "get the base concept checked in the ideas and brainstorming forum before you try to fix the full draft". I'm wondering if now is the time to implement a step for newer authors with heavily problematic drafts necessitating that they get their ideas checked before writing anything new, and before receiving detailed feedback that ultimately might go to waste if they just fix up the small details draft while ignoring the conceptual issues.

I brought up the proposal before the summer: http://05command.wikidot.com/forum/t-6103772/writing-help-forum-process-change but since there were some comments against it (granted, from staff who don't regularly post in the help forums), I didn't push for implementation.

All that said… I'm going to be increasing my IRL work hours in January. I won't be able to keep an eye on the forums and jump in several times a week to pick up slack, and I don't want any staff to feel guilty for not contributing to what's pretty much the most thankless and ill-appreciated task on the entire site.

As a general note of the average experience… today I picked up five threads to critique at my own pace while I did chores. When I was 2/5 done, three more threads were posted, one of which that had two drafts.

This is on top of going through apps and keeping the forums clean and commenting on all the responses I get on threads I've already left a review on. We need something to make the forums more efficient, because soon I won't be around as much to help turn the tides.