From Talk:Credit repair
Kielsky has graciously provided content from his Electronic Credit Repair Kit for this article.
While I can readily comprehend the concerns voiced here about whether or not User Kielsky is or is not attempting to advertise his "products" here and I can also easily comprehend the concerns over the copyright issues I think that there is a much greater concern regarding the presentation of the material.
While it is true that there is and has been a mountain of scams and misinformation regarding the subject of credit repair and also the fact that enormous numbers of consumers have both been ripped off and greatly helped I will also hasten to assure one and all that User Kielsky is not a scam artist nor a ripoff artist and has helped a very large number of people and does offer a volume of excellent and even free information.
Be that as it may, it is my understanding that the purpose of a wikipedia is defining things so that people understand what it is and if applicable a bit about how it operates. I do not feel that goal has been accomplished in any way, shape or form by User Kielsky's posting.
I will attempt to resolve that problem.
Credit repair: A process whereby various letters are sent to credit bureaus in an attempt to force the change or deletion of inaccurate or adverse information contained in one's credit bureau records. Statistically speaking the practice is only about 40 percent successful for both individuals and firms alike.
Quite frankly, I fail to see where much more than that needs to be said to define it. Such blatant commercialism as has been demonstrated herein has little or no place in a wikipedia.
Moved from User Talk:RickK:
What do we do about the credit repair external link? I am troubled that this article is being used to generate trafic for a commercial web site. At the same time when I look at the site I see pages of valuable indepth information. I wish WP was so useful on this topic. The problem we have is that the web site info is copyrighted and can be used on WP only by citing the web page. Unfortunately, that means we should be deleting the whole page and not just the link. Can we come to some sort of compromise with the author? mydogategodshat 04:31, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
I'm honestly confused. How in the world is proper, honest attribution to another site, and, on top of which, that site is FREE to all comers, and has been a free internet resource for nearly a decade, in any way an advertisement? Kielsky 16:34, Nov 20, 2003 (UTC)
Restored attribution statement. Compare Functional programming. Read the Text of the GFDL. Read wikipedia:copyrights. Note what we ask people who use Wikipedia content to do. Note that I and others have given assurances to third parties that the GFDL ensures that they will be credited - thus I will consider myself obliged to issue a DMCA takedown notice if Wikipedians start violating the GFDL by removing copyright notices while keeping the content. Martin 19:14, 21 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Help Me Fix My Credit Video
More attribution fuss
User:Kielsky
User:Kielsky keeps inserting advertising into Credit repair. RickK 04:11, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Ambiguity about copyright
Here's what Kielsky's external website says:
This entire document is copyrighted. "Electronic Credit Repair Kit" is a trademark of [Michael Kielsky].
I'm not sure if this counteracts his "donation" of the "part" which found its way into credit repair. I'm not going to be anal about it -- since IANAL and proud of it! -- but it looks like either:
- He should take back his excerpt and go away, no hard feelings; or,
- Wikipedia is now a co-owner of the excerpt, and we have no more obligation to maintain a "donation notice" or "copyright notice" than we do for any of the other ten thousand articles. --Uncle Ed 19:31, 21 Nov 2003 (UTC)
A mention in "links" is not acceptable, as it does not make it clear that this is a required copyright statement rather than normal editable text. Thus, later Wikipedians may inadvertantly remove the statement, believing it to be unnecessary. Martin 19:29, 21 Nov 2003 (UTC)
I've mailed wiki-legal.
The GFDL has strings attached - that is what distinguishes it from public domain text. We certainly have an obligation to maintain copyright notices for content from non-Wikipedians, unless they waive that right under the GFDL. Not only do we have this obligation, but so do all our downstream licensees.
It is possible to argue that where a Wikipedia user is contributing his own text, this is not a direct license under the GFDL, but rather implicit permission is given to Wikipedia to publish the material, where that published material is released under the GFDL. Such arguments are dubious, however, especially where, as in this case, Kielsky is explicitly disagreeing with this interpretation. Martin 19:47, 21 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Hi guys saw Martin's request on Wikilegal-L. IAAL and this is not a legal opinion (NALO), but let's get one thing straight. When you contribute material to Wikipedia, either if it is published or unpublished you grant a license. Who do you grant that license to? We could discuss that for hours, but the fact is that it is "released under the GNU FDL" as stated below the window where I am currently typing this text. Once that happens it can be "edited mercilessly and redistributed at will".(period). Anyone else who logs on can deleted it or change it (though there are arguments that you cannot unilaterally delete the work of another, but you can certainly transform it into a new work that totally minimalizes the copyrighted content of prior contributions. Once you make a contribution you cannot ask that you get any more attribution rights than anyone else under the GFDL as we do not accept invariant sections here (that is clear if one links through to Wikipedia:copyrights. I don't think that the external links are for advertising and I know of at least one case where someone contested that very issue when dealing with a topic that had certain proprietary rights associated with certain words in the article (how is that for legal obfuscation). The point is that the information on that site should and could be added to Wikipedia, that is what we are hear for. Wikipedia is not a collection of links and any links at the bottom of an article should be to provide more primary source material on the topic of the article. As far as credit repair services, if someone is looking for something like that they can look it up in a search engine. Wikipedia is not a search engine; also this article should deal with credit repair on other countries beside the USA. -- Alex756 21:12, 21 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Okay, I've finally read the original text of the article - before I did my "clean room" rewrite. And I hate to say it but I suspect the original poster of running a scam. Note that I do not "accuse" or "charge" this, in a totally smelly (ANAL) sense! But the utter lack of any mention of LEGITIMATE bad entries in one's credit report is suspicious: I was shocked to find that the article implies that most "credit repair" is the removal of errors; I think it's just the other way around: most credit repair is either:
- paying back what you owe
- scams to AVOID paying back what you owe
We might also mention identity theft, but that's a separate topic. --Uncle Ed 21:41, 21 Nov 2003 (UTC)
First, I'm not running a scam. My website has been up for nearly a decade, and is (and has always been) available for free. While I've had many offers to "do credit repair" from people over the years, I simply refuse to do it. The info is there, choose to use it if you wish. As to "being shocked", well, I can appreciate that, because it IS shocking. Because of the complex interaction between the laws, regulations, creditor practices, and debt collection practices, in most cases you may be better off NOT repaying some debts. I can show example after example where someone who has done the morally upright thing, and repaid all their debts but not within their original terms, is in far worse "creditworthiness" shape than someone who has simply walked away from their obligations. You don't have to trust me on this, when formalized, this process is called "bankruptcy". Finally, most of the people that seem to benefit from my page are not those shirking their obligations, but many, like some of us, who have encountered circumstances (and not without blame), which has lead one mistake to reflect badly on their credit report dozens of times. Many, many, many of these are due to unscrupulous collection agencies, placing multiple collection items on a credit report for one bad debt, multiplied over and over again whenever that debt is passed to yet another collection agency. Such entries are subject to removal upon dispute, because they are false. One bad debt entry versus 13 bad debt entries, that's a huge difference on a credit report. No scam, just the facts and the law. Please, do your own research, I find the Federal Trade Commission Staff Opinion Letters (http://www.ftc.gov/os/statutes/fcra/) most instructive. --User:Kielsky 17:55, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Village pump discussion
The following text (in blue) was moved from the village pump.
I am particularly interested in the controversy around Credit repair as outlined in the messages on User talk:RickK (which may soon move to Talk:Credit repair) Talk:Credit repair. Particularly,
Can an author donate text to Wikipedia and insist that a copyright notice remain? The page given to editing users does specify the license, but not who the license holder will be. Should it be specified? silsor 01:41, Nov 21, 2003 (UTC)
Making the "Document" include the Talk page would lead to the unfortunate result of requiring anyone who prints out and distributes the article under the rules for "verbatim copying" to also print out the full talk page (and any talk page archives) and distribute it alongside the article itself. This would be bad. Making the Document include all of Wikipedia would have even worse consequences.
We do include attribution text in the article itself for a number of articles, where required under the GFDL. See, for example, the Nupedia and Wikipedia list. The attribution statement requested by Kielsky is roughly equivalent to such notices, and is not unreasonable. Martin 19:19, 21 Nov 2003 (UTC)
An attribution is not unreasonable, but it is not required and it can be removed. Isn't the system for providing attribution from outside Wikipedia is one's listing on the page history? If one is making a contribution to Wikipedia isn't the attribution in the page history? If not, is not everyone who writes something on Wikipedia entitled to add a © date and name at the end of the article? This would seem to clutter things up to a terrible degree. Should each user have the right to go back and make such an addition at the end of the article? The reality is that we are making a collaborative work. If someone dumps their work on Wikipedia from their hard disk, their published book or something else, it does not change the attribution rules. Don't we all contribute our work equally here? Does any one have greater rights than any other contributor? The only time this becomes problematic is if one moves an article from one page to the next, cutting and pasting the text will destroy the page history, and IMO this is a violation of the attribution rules and not respectful of the contributions of others (this also occurs when a page is translated from one language to another, the translator should list the five major contributors in the summary box when translating and the origin language url). Just a suggestion, not a legal opinion. -- Alex756 06:38, 22 Nov 2003 (UTC)
As long as we are not required to maintain a link to Kielsky's website AND Kielsky agrees that every sentence he added to the article is now covered by the GFDL, I have no more objections.
By the way, sorry about my hasty and suspicious remarks last month. I probably should not have applied the word scam in connection with your website... --Uncle Ed 16:23, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
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