jonathan.rawle.org

In July 2006, another Wikipedia user left a message on my talk page to say that he had begun an article on renowned Leicester space physicist Ken Pounds, and noting that I was a Leicester physicist, invited me to contribute to the article. Although I was reluctant to write about someone I vaguely knew, the article as it stood wasn’t brilliant, so I decided to expand it. As when writing any other article for Wikipedia, I took information from a number of sources on the web and provided links to them at the end of the article.

A couple of weeks ago, the question came up of whether Ken Pounds was the first chief executive of PPARC. I couldn’t remember, but knew the answer would be in his Wikipedia article. I was quite surprised to find the article had been deleted. I checked the log for the article, and found it had been deleted by a Wikipedia administrator called Refdoc with the comment that is was a “blatant copyright violation”, and giving a link to a report by the Irish Higher Education Authority entitled Research Infrastructure in Ireland – Building for Tomorrow.

Initially, I suspected someone might have pasted a load of text into the article from the report, but wondered why Refdoc couldn’t have reverted to an older version of the article. However, when I checked the Irish HEA’s report, I discovered that they had actually copied the Wikipedia article word for word and used it as a biography for Prof Pounds, who is on the steering committee that produced the report. Thus the biography in the report uses my words to explain that it’s a “rare distinction” to be awarded an honorary degree by the institution one works at (or at least I think they’re my words – it seems the University have also been reading Wikipedia, re-worded in their case, for material promoting the Alumni Association Lecture 2008). The report also contains the slightly obscure statement that someone added to Wikipedia, that “one of [Ken’s] many discoveries is that Black holes are common in the Universe.”

I know I wrote the article in summer 2006, shortly after I was contacted by the other user. I checked the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, and indeed, it had archived the article in September 2006. From this archived version, it is clear that the text is identical to that in the HEA report. Yet the report was only published in December 2006! While I personally already knew the text was originally from Wikipedia, I thought the evidence I’d found would surely convince anyone else. Yet Refdoc refused the re-instate the article, accusing me of being a user with “poor respect for copyrights” and saying he had little reason to believe me. He clearly hadn’t looked at the internet archive version. That comes as no surprise, as a little investigation before he deleted the article in the first place would have revealed that the Wikipedia article existed before the HEA report. The Wikipedia edit history would also have shown that it was written and improved over a number of edits by different people, rather than copied wholesale from anywhere else. Therefore Refdoc is clearly not a particularly thorough administrator on Wikipedia.

I have now initiated Wikipedia’s Deletion review process, and at the time of writing there is a consensus that the article was wrongly deleted. Hopefully the article will be reinstated by next week.

This episode brings up an interesting point about Wikipedia. They have a strict policy when it comes to copyright, where copying directly from another source is not allowed. But as more and more documents copy text from Wikipedia, it’s going to become harder to tell which was the original source. I think the Irish HEA’s report probably violates the GFDL, as they are supposed to credit Wikipedia, and also to license any document that builds upon a GFDL’d document under the same licence. They haven’t done so, and while I’m sure that I and the other contributors don’t object to our work being used, failure to include an acknowledgement has ultimately resulted in it being us who were accused of breaching copyright.

As for Wikipedia administrators, candidates for that role will have to be prepared to put in a lot of work to investigate suspected copyright violations, as more and more will be false alarms. Anyone who isn’t prepared to do that isn’t fit to be an administrator. In the future it’s going to be more important to check the history of an article, and look for any other evidence to determine who has copied whom.

Now, I wonder how many of my other contributions to Wikipedia have been deleted while I wasn’t looking…

Update: the article on Ken Pounds was reinstated the same day.

Today the Chancellor finally announced what the measure would be to compensate people who have lost out due to the income tax changes. They are going to give all basic rate taxpayers an extra £120 by raising the personal tax allowance by five times that amount. That was the solution to the problem that I suggested nearly two weeks ago.

I’m glad the government have seen sense, and are rectifying their mistake in this way, rather than introducing some new, complex system of benefits or credits. They are also adjusting the 40% tax band so that higher-rate taxpayers won’t receive extra money. However, they aren’t going to lower the threshold so as so bring enough people into the band to pay for the tax cut at the lower rate. Instead, the tax cut is going to cost £2.7 billion.

Ominously, the BBC report that people will gain £120 this year. We should be under no illusions that this will be a permanent tax cut. Next year, the personal allowance won’t increase nearly as much as it would have done, and over time, further reduced increases in the allowance will mean that the £2.7 billion is eventually clawed back. But as no-one can know what the increases would have been without today’s announcement, they won’t be able to complain about losing out. The amount of tax collected will be the same in the end, but I suppose at least low earners won’t be hit with a big increase in tax all at once.

Unfortunately for the Labour Party – and Brown and Darling in particular – I don’t think this measure will do anything for their electability. They are already badly damaged by the original policy error. Maybe a change in leadership is needed before the next election.

Last week the government seemingly did a u-turn over the scrapping of the 10 pence rate of income tax, although it is far from clear what form the compensation will take for people on lower incomes who will lose out under the new tax regime.

It’s difficult to see how the government could have thought it a good idea to change taxes so that everyone gains except those who earn £15,000 or less a year, who will lose out by anything up to £150. This is obviously very unfair, and hits those people for whom £100–150 is a lot of money.

The desire to simplify the taxation system is a worthy one. However, removing one band of income tax wasn’t really the best place to start. What makes the tax system too complex is the system of tax credits, which is supposed to compensate people who have been failed by the system in the first place. Surely it would be far better to have a fairer base system of taxation, rather than having tax credits as corrections – which are so difficult to understand that millions of pounds go unclaimed each year. Unfortunately, the “compensation” which the government has promised people who have lost out following the abolition of the 10p rate will undoubtedly be yet another type of tax credit (if it materialises at all).

Perhaps a better solution would be to raise everyone’s tax-free personal allowance by £750. That would mean everyone would gain £150 that would otherwise have been paid in tax at the 20p rate. To recoup the loss in revenue, the government could lower the threshold at which the higher rate of tax is paid – the actuaries will have to figure out that one, as it requires knowledge of the distribution of salaries across the whole population. This solution would result in an equally simple system of tax thresholds (0, 20p, 40p) but be fairer in that those on the lowest incomes would pay a little less, and high-earners a little more.

Monthly bank charges would hit low earners

Also in the news this week was that UK banks have lost the first stage of the case against account penalty charges. The judge has ruled that the Office of Fair Trading can decide on the fairness of charges. As I have said before, if penalty charges are outlawed completely, the banks might respond by introducing monthly account charges, which would be bad for all customers.

As has been reported in the last week, people on low incomes would be hit hard by the abolition of the 10p starting rate of income tax. For those people, the loss of £100 or so per year is highly significant. Therefore, if they suddenly had to pay £10 per month simply for having a bank account, that would hit them just as hard. Yet that could be the result of the “crusade” against penalty charges. The result could be that people will be forced to close their bank accounts, dividing the population into two classes: those who can afford bank accounts, and those who can not. That seems far from fair.

It simply isn’t the case that people on low incomes currently pay penalty charges and those on higher incomes don’t. Many people on low incomes manage their money extremely carefully and avoid going overdrawn, just as their grandparents did before living off credit seemed the norm. It isn’t fair to penalise people just because others have been careless enough to incur account fees.

I still hope that a ruling against penalty charges by the Office of Fair Trading will not result in monthly account charges for everyone. However, if it does, we could see people on low incomes being hit just has hard as they have been by the abolition of the 10p income tax rate.

I received my copy of the Spring 2008 University of Leicester Graduates’ Review today, and was quite surprised to find my photo of Leicester Prison accompanying an article on TV and internet in prisons.

They have credited the photo to “https://jonathan.rawle.org/gallery/using/”, which is actually my page of terms and conditions for using my photos. At least they have included an acknowledgement, and the Graduates’ Review counts as a non-commercial publication, so I’m happy for them to use the image. I only wish they’d asked me for a higher-resolution version, as it’s quite pixellated if you look closely.

Today is Mothering Sunday in the UK, on which people honour their mothers, often giving gifts and cards. However, unlike the American Mother’s Day, which is celebrated on the second Sunday in May and is a 20th century invention, Mothering Sunday has much earlier origins as a date in the Church calendar, when people returned to their “mother church” – the nearest large church or cathedral – on the fourth Sunday of Lent. As such, the date moves with the date of Easter, so can fall any time from the start of March to mid-April.

Despite its historical significance in the UK, it is now almost impossible to buy a card that says, “Happy Mothering Sunday”. Almost all cards now say, “Happy Mother’s Day”. This is at least partly because people are looking for a celebration that is the exact equivalent to the entirely American-invented Father’s Day, but also reflects the general trend to pick up American words and phrases to displace our own, which is then compounded by the media using the same expressions.

This erosion of our culture is unfortunate, particularly as it’s happening without people realising. Most people don’t realise the term they are using is American. While many people in the UK are not religious and don’t consider themselves Christians, even the famous athiest Richard Dawkins has said that Christian traditions form an important part of our nation’s heritage. Almost everyone celebrates Christmas, but few go to church, and many people are non-believers. Christmas is an important festival during which families get together and people show seasonal goodwill towards other, even if it has little or no religious significance to most people. Anyway attempts to rename Christmas have quite rightly been subjected to ridicule. So why should we rename Mothering Sunday? If people prefer to celebrate the American holiday, they can do so in May. But changing the name of Mothering Sunday to its American counterpart is the equivalent of British people deciding to celebrate Thanksgiving on 25 December. Using the name Mothering Sunday is in keeping with the British tradition of retaining historical dates from the Church calender, but giving the festivals a modern, secular meaning that’s inclusive for everyone.

Another good reason for avoiding “Mother’s Day” is that it removes the dilemma of where to put the apostrophe. I have seen all three possibilities this year: Mother’s Day, Mothers Day and Mothers’ Day. The first is by far the most common, yet it could actually be argued that any one of them is correct. Unfortunately, many people won’t even think about what the apostrophe means, which is probably why it’s generally put before the “s”, where they think an apostrophe is automatic. It’s far better to use a name for the day that doesn’t require an apostrophe at all.

The irony is, I have an American-made calendar on my wall, and it manages to correctly identify today as Mothering Sunday. It shows Mother’s Day as being 11 May. The Americans themselves appear to have no problem accepting different countries’ conventions and culture, it’s just that the British seem to have no idea about their own.