Talk:Prosecution of Syrian civil war criminals

Copyright problem removed

Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: https://populartimelines.com/timeline/Syrian-Civil-War https://www.slideshare.net/sakshiathwani1/human-rights-sakshi. Copied or closely paraphrased material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.)

For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, and, if allowed under fair use, may copy sentences and phrases, provided they are included in quotation marks and referenced properly. The material may also be rewritten, providing it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Therefore, such paraphrased portions must provide their source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you. Nnadigoodluck (talk) 13:13, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

I made a mistake but fixed with the next edit the "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Prosecution_of_Syrian_civil_war_criminals&oldid=914428846" The attribution is presented. The content of this article is distributed in many background articles. There is a section about this background articles (they are all listed). The goal is to:Attribution: "ICC" related content in is copied from Human rights violations during the Syrian Civil War on Sep 7, 2019. Please see the history of that page for full attribution. "This is to improve the content distributed many pages and 'require cleanup' to meet Wikipedia's quality standards." BlueMadrigal (talk) 13:23, 7 September 2019 (UTC)BlueMadrigal (talk) 13:17, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

@Bluemadrigal: Don't worry, you're not in any problem whatsoever. An Administrator will just need to purge the copy-vio from history and you're good to go. Keep editing.

Cheers Nnadigoodluck (talk) 13:28, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

@BlueMadrigal and Nnadigoodluck: The student B.Com.LLB text https://www.slideshare.net/sakshiathwani1/human-rights-sakshi states that its date is 30 September 2013. But it has the text A Libyan psychologist, Siham Sergewa, conducted a survey of refugees in Tunisia and Egypt to document the trauma of the civil war. Nearly 300 women reported having been raped. The real number is probably much higher, considering the stigma attached to rape victims in Libyan society. Every single woman in the survey who admitted to being raped, said they were raped by Col. Gaddafi's soldiers or militiamen.

This same text was added by Frogtrain to the Libyan HR violations article on 22:18, 28 May 2011, more than two years earlier. I don't see how Frogtrain could have copied from Sakshi, since it's unlikely that Sakshi would have had a finalised text ready two years before the formal submission date. The yahoo and cnn sources for the edit are dead URLs now. It seems more likely that Sakshi copied the Wikipedia text than vice versa.

So I'm rather sceptical about this supposed copyvio edit being justified. It's a reality that websites think that they can copy/paste Wikipedia material without attribution, and students plagiarise (and copyvio) from Wikipedia articles. See also my worry below.

I'll quote from Wikipedia:Copyright_violations#Dealing_with_copyright_violations: Some cases will be false alarms. For example, text that can be found elsewhere on the Web that was in fact copied from Wikipedia in the first place is not a copyright violation – at least not on Wikipedia's part. Boud (talk) 00:39, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

@Diannaa: - from the edit history, you may be interested in this discussion too. Boud (talk) 00:44, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

I already restored it once, back in September; it was copied from Syrian Civil War. The page https://populartimelines.com/timeline/Syrian-Civil-War is a Wikipedia mirror. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 00:53, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

@Diannaa, BlueMadrigal, and Nnadigoodluck: Thanks Diannaa, it's overwhelmingly obvious that your're right, in the sense that the populartimelines.com page is a selection and slight cleaning (removal of references, addition of year headers) of Syrian Civil War. Together with the Sakshi page as much more likely a case of plagiarism and copyright violation of Wikipedia than vice versa, I see no evidence for copyright violation in Prosecution of Syrian civil war criminals. (I guess a comment at Talk:Amity Law School, Delhi couldn't hurt.) I'll restore the recently removed material. If someone disagrees, then please first try to convince editors of Syrian Civil War at Talk:Syrian Civil War to remove the lead and most of the key paragraphs as copyright violations... Boud (talk) 21:24, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Dubious as copyright violation?

This edit removed some text that is clearly in common with https://populartimelines.com/timeline/Syrian-Civil-War. But the Wikipedia text is very dense in terms of citations - it would be surprising for Wikipedians making this much effort in adding citations to insert them into existing text without modifying the text to better much the citations. If you start with text that seems reasonable and then search for sources, the sources will almost never give you quite what someone has written unsourced. To me it seems more likely that populartimelines copied from Wikipedia without attribution. A lot of the references look to me to rather strongly resemble my (slightly older) style of referencing, with a few subsequent tidies like removal of unused parameters. On the other hand, the text does not look like my style. So it could be that someone picked out existing references from other articles and inserted them into copyvio'd text to make it look justified.

In case anyone wishes to try tracing this, here is a talk page section about the split from Syrian Civil War to create Human rights violations during the Syrian Uprising (7-8 July 2012). Fanzine99 forgot to add a formal attribution to Syrian Civil War. Boud (talk) 00:18, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

It's also quite possible that other people picked up my style of referencing... Boud (talk) 00:41, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Solved - see the previous section. Copyright violation of the rights of Wikipedia authors, not by Wikipedia authors. Boud (talk) 21:33, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Split proposal

Propose to split a new article named War crimes during the Syrian Civil War to describe the events for which the criminals are persecuted, in line with other articles on major wars (such as War crimes in the Kosovo War).GreyShark (dibra) 11:02, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

I think that would be a complementary article rather than a split. For the moment, at least, the number of prosecutions is tiny, and it's based on the chance of sufficient evidence + a suspect under custody + universal jurisdiction coinciding, rather than an overview of war crimes of the whole war. A war crimes article would have to show an overview - based on the sources, of course. Boud (talk) 01:37, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, as above. This isn't so much of a split as a whole new article. PARAKANYAA (talk) 09:30, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

If content is split off it should be from the section at List of war crimes#2011–present: Syrian civil war. This also has significant overlap with Human rights violations during the Syrian civil war. PARAKANYAA (talk) 01:23, 24 December 2023 (UTC)