Thread:Gingey Boi/@comment-86.191.16.90-20141108083140/@comment-961279-20141108162555

Tina, this is in reference to an incident over four years ago where the former administrators did not like a change Wikia had announced and they wanted to remove everything when they left. They were not allowed to under the Terms of Use, so they decided to start vandalizing the wiki. The "consequences" this person mentions would probably be another threat of a lawsuit, which he does every so often to try and intimidate us into doing what he wants.

But he hasn't realized that there is enough vandalism on record that a counter-suit could likely be filed against him personally. Not an organization or the wiki he runs. Him. And if he did choose to pursue a lawsuit, he is on record as saying that only a portion of his own wiki is original work, meaning the rest was copied from other places. I believe that while an investigation was in progress to see exactly how much was copied was properly credited (his main point of contention), the standard practice by the court is to lock things down so that there cannot be any changes or removals of information. Meaning, that other wiki is out of commission while this is going on, and they would also likely be forbidden to start a new wiki while the lawsuit is in progress.

That said, this is a bit like writing a report in school. If you quoted something from a book or a magazine article and did not note the source, the teacher would reduce your grade on that report. Or, you use those for inspiration but you put it into different words.

For a wiki, you do need to say in the Edit Summary which other wiki you got the information from. As you can see, it would be better if we came up with our own information instead of copying or adapting it from that other wiki. If I remember right, they made a policy that this is not allowed, even if it was properly noted and compliant with the licensing.