User talk:Philidias

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Noel (talk)

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Lorenzo de' Medici

Hi, why did you delete all that text from the Lorenzo article? Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not paper, and most of it was interesting/useful. The article could even stand to be a bit longer (e.g. giving more details of the Naples war, his constitutional changes, etc), without it becoming duplicative of a real biography. I put most of the stuff you removed back, and also used almost all of your added text (the list of philosophers in his circle was a particularly good thought). Noel (talk) 17:30, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Hi, your situation (which you explained to someone via email) has been explained to us. The thing is that even if we did change our copy of the page, I'm not sure that would help you. That is because Google (and Yahoo, etc) cache pages (i.e. keep their own copies of pages), which is what they actually use when they do a search. (I often do searches, and when I click on a result, get a 404 from the actual page - that's because Google is relatively slow to revisit old pages.)

So using Google to search for the text that you used would probably return the Wikipedia page even if our copy has been updated - the Google system is unlikely to notice that we have changed the page for quite a few days, and so they will still have the old text in their local copy.

I'm really sorry for you, but I'm afraid that you are probably going to have to face the music. My suggestion is that you go talk to your teacher right away, and explain that you didn't realize that what you did counted as plagiarism, etc. Getting in front of it's probably better than letting her find it out. Noel (talk) 02:35, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I just checked on Google for some of the text you've been removing, and Google does indeed have a local cached copy. But it's even worse than I realized: Wikipedia content is copied by lots of sites, which also update their local copies rather slowly. And Google has indexed all them too. So, basically, you're stuck - if someone searches for the text you used, they will find it, no matter what we do on the page here. Noel (talk) 02:40, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Warning

If you remove text from the article again, you will be blocked for vandalism. - Fredrik | talk 21:52, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)