[scikit-learn] StackOverflow Documentation

[Sebastian Raschka]

Hm, that’s an “interesting” approach by SO, I guess their idea is to build a collection of code-and-example based snippets for less well-documented libraries — especially, libraries that want to keep their documentation lean. 

> But I assume that copying without attribution is actually plagiarism and should be reverted, 


as far as I know, you are right regarding BSD.

In this scikit-learn case, it seems more like that these users are merely “farming” for SO points and rep by reposting scikit-learn documentation. In my opinion, the polite way to go about it is to just comment as a scikit-learn dev saying that these reposts are okay under the BSD license but that a contribution to the original source needs to be added since it violates the copyright otherwise — like you mentioned — and adding a nice message encouraging these users to make suggestions and improvements to the original docs. (and if nothing changes after xx days, I would report it to SO).


> On Aug 4, 2016, at 12:25 AM, Joel Nothman <joel.nothman at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> StackOverflow has introduced its Documentation space, where scikit-learn is a covered subject: http://stackoverflow.com/documentation/scikit-learn. The project is a little interesting, and otherwise somewhat exasperating/tiring, given the overlap with our own documentation efforts, which we would like to see continually improve and maintain alignment with the codebase.
> 
> Currently there seem to be two contributors. One appears to have been copy-pasting official scikit-learn documentation, while the other has produced original material. From a license perspective, copy-pasted material might be okay with attribution and reference to a BSD licence, with the assumption that it is then double-licensed (BSD and CC-BY-SA) if copied from SO.
> 
> But I assume that copying without attribution is actually plagiarism and should be reverted, while we should discourage copying with attribution: if SO Documentation for scikit-learn has its place, it should be different to the official reference...?
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