Please read: Guidelines for writing descriptions in the wiki
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Hey wiki editors – we’ve noticed recently that are some descriptions in our wiki that have been lifted wholesale from other sites. We need to make sure that the description is completely unique to Folia as search engines doesn’t look too kindly on copied verbatim information (regardless of if it has been attributed or not) and we are currently being penalised by Google as a result.
Please remember whenever you are adding to the wiki to write everything in your own words and only reference using footnotes to indicate where you sourced the specific data from.
In particular, the Rose varieties need immediate attention – I’m working on reviewing these descriptions this weekend, but if anyone has a spare hour or so to pitch in that would be much appreciated :)
I’ve covered off the top 13 varieties of Rose so far and quickly rewritten the descriptions (feel free to tweak or add more content to these if you can find it):
- Knock Out
- Mister Lincoln
- Double Delight
- Iceberg
- Joseph’s Coat
- Double Knock Out
- Peace
- Queen Elizabeth
- The Fairy
- Zéphirine Drouhin
- Don Juan
- New Dawn
- Rainbow Knock Out
If you notice any other areas around the wiki that look to be copied and pasted, please let me know and we can hopefully start a bit of a working bee to start repairing this so we can start getting back in Google’s good books :)
Many thanks!
2 thumbs up!Posted about 1 year ago -
Just found a good free tool we can use to identify plagiarized content – just copy and paste the contents of the description textbox into this page to check if it is ours or someone elses:
If anyone has any other tools they know of please share (bonus points if the tool has an API as we can then have a think about integrating into the site)
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3 thumbs up!Posted about 1 year ago
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Have managed to cover more entries for Rose tonight, but there are still many pages to go that need rewriting so if anyone has a spare couple of minutes to help out this weekend it would be most appreciated.
I’m working through the Roses in order of popularity and adding the colour in for each one to mark that I’ve covered it – so if you see any without the colour feel free to jump in and rewrite the description. Thanks again…
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0 thumbs up!Posted about 1 year ago
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I’ve added some new fields to the wiki to try and standardise some of the info I’m rewriting in the Rose wiki – see here for announcement
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0 thumbs up!Posted about 1 year ago
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Oops, I’m afraid I have probably been guilty of this myself, not realizing that it was such a big no-no! Especially if it was referenced. I haven’t done any of the roses in the past, but I’ll try to do some of my others as I get a couple minutes here and there.
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0 thumbs up!Posted about 1 year ago
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I have CnP a lot of info into the wiki, always with citations. Actually, every one I’ve ever done has CnP throughout. I didn’t realize that wasn’t ok.
Is there anyway we can get a list of wikis we have contributed to?
I’m going to make a guess that the vast majority of the wikis have some level of plagiarism in them, on the assumption that most users didn’t realize we needed to write original essays.
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0 thumbs up!Posted about 1 year ago
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Hmm, looks like this might be a much bigger issue than I thought :(
I’ve just quickly added an audit page for each folian so you can easily see your own plant and variety audits (this page is not accessible for anyone other than you)
http://myfolia.com/gardener/creme/audits
http://myfolia.com/gardener/SneIrish/audits
If you could take a look through this list and try to repair when you get a chance it would be hugely appreciated…
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1 thumbs up!Posted about 1 year ago
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That plagiarism site generally finds the folia listing and so claims the result is not unique. How should we use it to check for plagiarism?
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0 thumbs up!Posted about 1 year ago
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I’m pretty sure there are better tools out there for this than the link above, so I’m going to look into getting a list of tools that we can use for this. In the meantime I was using the site above to check if there was any other instances of the paragraph(s) other than us. For most cases with the Rose varieties so far, the referenced site in the footnotes was also appearing back with exactly the same sentence structure, so it was pretty clear that the text was being lifted directly from that source. I’m not sure if this tool will be as useful for other examples as it might be that we find that other sites have lifted from us, which is going to be difficult to untangle. We’ll just have to assess entry by entry I think…
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0 thumbs up!Posted about 1 year ago
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Oh, dear. I have 16 pages to take care of. Yikes! This might take a while. Luckily, not all these have extensive work to take care of. :(
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0 thumbs up!Posted about 1 year ago
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I seem to be unable to edit the wiki. When I click edit, I am taken to a blank page with a series of categories on it. Clicking on the category name does not have any effect. I too am guilty of block-quoting other sources and attributing them in footnotes. I’ll go back through the pages that I’ve touched and see if I can change that.
… if I can get the edit to work…
I’m using Win XP SP3 w/ Firefox 11.0 -
0 thumbs up!Posted about 1 year ago
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In case anyone wants to do a bit of reading around the topic, here’s a post from Google that explains the change
Essentially the idea is that if Google finds attribution and quoted content it is now smart enough to take that as an indicator that the referenced page is better quality than the page that is referencing the quote and thus return it higher in all search results for the term (which makes complete sense when you think about it). What we need to do from here is start ensuring that all content is uniquely Folia’s which should improve our ranking – we have taken quite a massive dive in traffic over the last 2 months due to this change, but good news is that this is fixable.
The edit page links are merely shortcut anchor links in the page – if you scroll down you should be able to see the whole form. Not sure yet why the links aren’t working as they should (they seem to be working for me) but I’ll do some more testing and update this thread here
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0 thumbs up!Posted about 1 year ago
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Forgot to update this thread: Ostrya, the issue with the edit page should now be fixed, there was a bug in the logic for the edit pages. Give me a shout if there is a still an issue.
I’m not making much of a dent in the Rose variety list description cleanup so far unfortunately, anyone have a spare couple of minutes over the next week or so to give me a hand with this task? If we all pick up a random entry every day or so I think we could make some good progress with this (I’ll also add a new thread in the wiki group to see if we can recruit a couple more people for this task too)
Also, a reminder to everyone if they think they might have copied content across from other sites – if you could review your wiki edits using your audit page and remove / rewrite any copied content it would be gratefully appreciated :)
You can find your audit page by adding your username to the link below:
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2 thumbs up!Posted about 1 year ago
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OK, so I worked on some of my wiki entries today. I think I got almost halfway through my audit list. I have a question. There are some narrative entries that I can view on the audit page, but when I go into the actual wiki edit page, those narrative entries aren’t there. Some of the ones I’ve read definitely are copy-and-pastes and need an edit, but I don’t know where to find them, or if they were even my entries to begin with. I’m a bit stumped with this. :\
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0 thumbs up!Posted about 1 year ago
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@SneIrish – thank you so much :) I haven’t had a chance to communicate some of the changes we have been making as there have been quite a few: there are a couple of paragraphs that are randomly automatically generated as sentences from the data in the wiki – this is to try and improve pages where we have some wiki data but no descriptions. The actual description you write will appear as the 2nd paragraph between the automatically generated ones.
If you do find some that appear to be worded strangely, let me know and I’ll try and improve the sentence generator logic so it sounds better :)
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0 thumbs up!Posted about 1 year ago
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