Talk:Internal and external forum

Untitled

64.26.98.90 (talk) 18:41, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

69.140.164.142 04:30, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

A properly formed conscience

The article says "a conscience must be properly formed". This requires expansion, since it's a really loaded phrase in Catholic moral theology. Jhobson1 23:11, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Plagiarism and other issues

This article appears to contain direct quotes from cited sources that are not identified as quotes. It also reads as if it presupposes that Catholicism is true in several places. Which is kind of weird.

In particular:

>The encroachments of the civil power on the Church's jurisdiction have in our days, practically though unwarrantly, restricted the ecclesiastical forum to spiritual causes only.

This is a direct quote from a 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia article, and not identified properly as such. Putting aside the silliness of referring to 1909 (or earlier) as "our days", it also takes the explicit view that it is inappropriate for modern states to make laws that interfere with presumed Church jurisdiction. I think we can all agree that a fairly idiosyncratic view of NPOV would be required to justify that. I'm fixing this one, but the whole article could use a strong review for similar issues.

Ccoraf (talk) 15:49, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

@Ccoraf: The texts of the original Catholic Encyclopedia can be used freely, and without a need to put it in quotes, since it is in the public domain due to the publication's age.

As for the quality of the original CE: yes, the source is old and biased and newer, more neutral sources would be appreciated. Veverve (talk) 20:26, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

It's not copyright infringement, it's plagiarism. Public domain is irrelevant. The problem is that a reader would not necessarily understand that they are reading a direct quote (from a 114-year old catholic source!). You can't leave that kind of thing up, waiting for better. You have to either fix it or take it down.

Here's my best effort at reworking it:

"According to the 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia, by that time the Church had little power to pursue or enforce material penalties."

I'm just realizing that almost the whole article is made of these badly-disguised block quotes. The solution is *probably* not to nuke it from orbit, but that's one way to be sure.

In the meanwhile I've thrown a plagiarism tag up on the top.

Ccoraf (talk) 13:49, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

It's not copyright infringement, it's plagiarism: plagiarism of non-copyrighted material is not a problem.

You can't leave that kind of thing up, waiting for better. You have to either fix it or take it down: we leave it up, like we do for all articles of this type. Information can be removed if better sources are found, and if statements are too biased attribution can be given.

In the meanwhile I've thrown a plagiarism tag up on the top: you have in fact put the copyright violation tag at the top... Again, plagiarism is accepted on WP as long as the source is no copyrighted. Same goes, for example, for articles being complete copy-pastes of the 1909-11 Catholic Encyclopedia or of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. Veverve (talk) 14:55, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

It's the same tag, so far as I can tell.

Plagiarism of uncopyrighted materials is not accepted according to WP:PLAG.

I think it's a shame that your reaction to someone trying to fix a problem comes across as unwelcoming and incurious, but I suppose it doesn't matter much if an obscure wikipedia article is bad and plagiarized. I'm not going to try any more here.

Ccoraf (talk) 22:58, 20 December 2023 (UTC)