Today, Turnitin® announces a collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that supports Wikipedia and its sister projects, and the Wikipedia community to help protect and preserve free knowledge. Turnitin’s software now runs alongside the existing bots on English Wikipedia, helping to screen pages and identify potential copyright violations on the site.
Turnitin’s technology works along with a copy-and-paste detection program developed by the Wikipedia community named EranBot, first envisioned by Wikipedian James Heilman (User:Doc James) and later developed by Wikipedian Eran Rosenthal.
"As an openly licensed free encyclopedia, Wikipedia respects copyright the same way traditional publishers do. In fact, each contributor in our community is a copyright owner who chooses to freely license his or her own work,” said Jake Orlowitz (User: Ocaasi (WMF)), head of the Wikipedia Library, the program dedicated to helping editors access reliable sources to improve Wikipedia. “Turnitin now gives us access to a more sophisticated system for flagging potential copyright violations."
As a result of the program, which went live on English Wikipedia in April 2015, thousands of new edits are checked each day which generates roughly 100 flags for Wikipedia editors to further investigate using Turnitin’s customized reports.
