Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-26717417-20170802073917/@comment-119.75.205.241-20170804062750

Andrewds1021 wrote:

183.90.37.218 wrote: In my first post, I ask if this is normal. Is it normal for wikia to allow blatant plagiarism of almost 300,000 words? To allow the posting of entire volumes of books? Would such a thing be allowed on other sites, say Wikipedia?

When does it becomes abnormal? First off, Wikia has a relatively small team. They are not the size of Google. To expect the staff to dedicate every day to crawling through every single page across every single wiki to catch possible license violations is unrealistic. They don't even do this for their own policies which one would assume they have the strongest motivation to enforce. Furthermore, you compare Wikia to Wikipedia. As far as I am aware, Wikipedia would have a similar issue. For the most part, even Wikipedia relies on its contributors to catch license violations. Thirdly, your question assumes that a license has in fact been violated. The question here it whether or not the community in question has actually violated a license.

Then, you proceed to misinterpret Wikia's policy. Per the quote you provided, Wikia states that translations of copyright-protected works counts as fair use. In this case, it seems they are referring to translations done by a Wikia user where the source material has a copyright. Your case is different as the Wikia user simply posted your translation. Whether or not your have a copyright on your work is one question that has not been definitively answered due to questions regarding the licenses of the original work and Blogger.

Even if the content posted is considered fair use, you then misinterpret the policy claiming that such content is not allowed on Wikia sites. This is not the case. If you read the quote you provided carefully, the restriction is not on the fair-use status of the material itself but how much fair use material a site posts. As such, a site that consists of primarily free content but does have a few pages containing fair use content is still within Wikia's policy. Fan translation is fan translation is fan translation.

The content policy says no fan translation, doesn't matter who wrote it in the first place. '''They literally provided that example so you wouldn't misinterpret its intent. '''It is obvious that fan translation is not licensed, they are not official translations.

There is no reason to think that a wikia user posting fan translations he wrote himself or on a website somewhere is different. Another example given is scan of comic book pages. Are you going to argue that someone may not post the whole comic book if he scanned it himself, but he can do so if it is posted somewhere else?

If you are going to argue the validity of the example given by wikia, go take it up with them.