User:Trizek (WMF)/sandbox/Editing/Paste check announcement/en
== Introducing Paste Check: a new Edit Check for Wikipedia ==
Paste Check is a new Edit Check feature to help avoid and fight copyright violations. When editors paste text into an article, Paste Check can prompt them to confirm the origin and licensing of the content.
Why Paste Check?
Paste Check benefits two audiences:
- Newcomers: Many new editors are unaware of Wikipedia’s policies regarding copyright violations. Some mistakenly believe that pasting from what they consider reliable sources is the way to edit.
- Experienced editors: Paste Check aims to make it easier to identify and patrol edits that may contain pasted content (which can be either legit or copyright violations), helping us save time.
The goal is to reduce the rate of copyright violations by at least 10% among newer editors.
How it works
By default, Paste Check will be shown to editors who have published 100 or fewer edits locally.
When an editor matching this requirement pastes at least 50 characters of text from somewhere else, Paste Check will ask them to confirm if they wrote the content. Two options are then available:
- Keep the text – the user is then asked to explain why.
- Remove the text – the text is removed.
In both cases, edits will be tagged so that experienced editors can identify edits in which Paste Check was shown. The tag will be visible even if the final edit didn’t include any pasted text.
Paste Check will trigger when text is pasted a source it doesn’t recognize as another editing environment. It won’t show up if the editor has pasted text which we can technically recognize is coming from another MediaWiki visual editor instance, MS Office, Libre Office, Google Docs, or is plain text.
To start, Paste Check will only work in the visual editor.
Get involved
The Editing team is seeking input on the proposed user experience and configuration.
We plan to test the following interface with new users (please help translating it):
We're planning to refine this interface over time, but want to start by launching a test so that we can determine whether the check is useful. We presented this interface to people who don't participate in Wikipedia, and they found it practical and easy to understand.
As a consequence, we would like to start by showing the feature to a fraction of newcomers for approximately 6 weeks. After this point, we will review the experiment results and decide what to do next.
Configuration and test
For experienced users, Paste Check will be configurable by the local communities (e.g. edit count thresholds, ignored sections and namespaces). Edits triggering Paste Check will be marked with the tag editcheck-paste-shown for easier tracking.
You can try the proposed Paste Check interface:
- Paste 50 characters or more from an external source, such as a website, to see the prompt.
Your feedback is valuable! Please share your thoughts below.