The copyright crisis, and why we should care
Moonriddengirl has been a Wikipedian since the first half of 2007, becoming an administrator for the English Wikipedia later that year. In that capacity, she dedicates much of her volunteer time to dealing with copyright concerns at the English Wikipedia's copyright problems board and contributor copyright cleanup, attempting to implement Wikimedia's zero tolerance policy on copyright infringements. In addition, she works for the Wikimedia Foundation in community liaison. Below, Moonriddengirl outlines her view that all contributors need to pull together to manage copyright concerns on the English Wikipedia.
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We have a copyright crisis. Wikipedia is full of copyright problems. How full, I don't know.
I do know that CorenSearchBot (before it became inoperable due to a catastrophic change in Yahoo's terms) routinely found several dozen new articles every day built on content copied from other websites. I know that every day more articles and images are tagged by human contributors for speedy deletion for copyright concerns or listed for the slower processes of the copyright problems board or possibly unfree files. I know that there are more tens of thousands of articles and images awaiting copyright review at WP:CCI than I want to tally; this is content placed by people we know have repeatedly violated copyright. Odds are good that a substantial portion of this content is a problem, too. In spite of policies prohibiting it—and in spite of prominent reminders of those policies on every edit page—more copyrighted content finds its way into our project every day.