I’m not a lawyer or your lawyer; but Wikipedia does not have a copyright attribution requirement for contributors(which some projects do; it’s not uncommon in FOSS projects that have a single major commercial backer that wants to be able to dual-license the project commercially without needing the consent of everyone who ever contributed). They say
“If you contribute text directly to Wikipedia, you thereby license it to the public for reuse under CC BY-SA and GFDL (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). Non-text media may be contributed under a variety of different licenses that support the general goal of allowing unrestricted re-use and re-distribution.”
“You retain copyright to materials you contribute to Wikipedia, text and media. Copyright is never transferred to Wikipedia. You can later republish and relicense them in any way you like. However, you can never retract or alter the license for copies of materials that you place here; these copies will remain so licensed until they enter the public domain when your copyright expires”
I think that would leave individual contributors with full standing to pursue copyright violations on material they place on wikipedia; subject to the limitation that they can’t retroactively decide to terminate the CC BY-SA and GFDL license offers extended by contributing in the first place; so only conduct not compatible with one of those two would leave the user in need of the author’s permission by other means.
But yes, it’s also hypocritical. Professors also enforce academic standards against plaigarism, so the supposed difference between Neri and Gay in this regard is manufactured nonsense - much like the “plaigarism” Gay was falsely accused of.
I don’t know that you can sue for “plagiarism”. It’s very likely the terms of service on Wikipedia transfer IP in the underlying contributions to the WMF or at am minimum provide a license (it would be trivial to check, but also anyone interested could do so - anyway it would be a very common approach) - meaning on WMF should have standing to sue for copyright infringement of a given article. However the broad out license complicates things because although it might technically be a copyright infringement if you posted content outside the scope of the licensed right (by, say, not citing Wikipedia), WMF’s recovery could be pretty limited and they probably have better things to do with limited resources.
or she had poor research habits: adding interesting bits of text into her notes, mixed with her own writing. later, when writing not even realizing what she’d done.
i’ve actually done that before. granted for my blog, not a dissertation, and i eventually realized what i’d done. ( these days i’m smart enough to know if something in my notes sounds clever and interesting - it’s not mine. )
All this digging into the minutiae is exactly what they want. Taking a step back and noting that this is more of a political set up than serious academic offense would serve us.
The nitpicking already happened and already had an effect. This is the Find Out part of FAFO.
The whole thing where people warn against holding bad actors accountable for their actions because they might do what they’ve already done or attempted! is so strange to me.
So, we should let a pretty white woman off the hook, but not a Black woman who busted her ass to get where she was and got REMOVED from her job over a pack of lies… Nah. Bullshit.
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