Category talk:Automatically Rewritten Articles to be Patrolled

Was this the best course of action?

Wouldn't it have been easier just to reference DeeZire's Guide as the source of information on these pages, while removing the DeeZire template so that the proper flag template can be used? I checked a few rewritten articles and they contain essentially the same information as before, just reworded. That doesn't lift the burden of plagiarism, properly acknowledging the source does. – Crimsonum 17:20, 12 November 2025 (UTC)

"Essentially the same information as before, just reworded" has been the goal as an entry level for those pages for twenty years - and the community refused to put in the effort to make it happen.

We imported DeeZire's words as a short-term crutch to get ModEnc off the ground, and yet here we are, two decades later, still brandishing the same "we just copied this" warning on literally hundreds of pages.

I'm done waiting.

If you want these pages to be further removed from DeeZire's original publication, feel free to invest the time and the research to add something to the topic.

Considering that nobody changed these pages in twenty years, for the time being, I'm going to have to assume that DZ researched the topic to completion and there's nothing else to say.

So stepping away from a state where we're just straight-up duct taping DZ's work onto our pages is the last thing to do.

Is this optimal? No. Was this the originally intended course of action? No.

Is it better than another twenty years of badly-formatted, never-edited, directly copied content?

Absolutely.

~ Renegade (SysOp) 17:07, 18 November 2025 (UTC)