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==== Review commentary ==== |
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I am nominating this featured article for review because see the talk page of this article and [[Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents/Plagiarism and copyright concerns on the main page]], original nominator retired because of this unfortunate incident. Fails unstability as this mess is being sorted out. [[User:Secret|Secret]] <sup>[[User talk:Secret|account]]</sup> 03:25, 1 November 2010 (UTC) |
I am nominating this featured article for review because see the talk page of this article and [[Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents/Plagiarism and copyright concerns on the main page]], original nominator retired because of this unfortunate incident. Fails unstability as this mess is being sorted out. [[User:Secret|Secret]] <sup>[[User talk:Secret|account]]</sup> 03:25, 1 November 2010 (UTC) |
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====FARC commentary==== |
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:''Problems are inappropriate sources used; academic sources seem to offer a different picture of what occurred; some of the paraphrasing is too close, and lacks in-text attribution; sources have been cited, but at points in the wrong places; and some of the writing is problematic''. |
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*'''Delist'''. It looks as though the article needs more work than can reasonably be done at FAR. The cultural section should be based on academic secondary sources. The details of what happened to Grace Sherwood need academic sourcing too, perhaps augmented by a careful use of primary sources. Newspapers can be used too, perhaps to discuss the current re-enactments, but shouldn't be used instead of scholarly sources. <font color="blue">[[User:SlimVirgin|SlimVirgin]]</font> <small><sup><font color="red">[[User_talk:SlimVirgin|talk|]]</font><font color="green">[[Special:Contributions/SlimVirgin|contribs]]</font></sup></small> 22:55, 6 November 2010 (UTC) |
Revision as of 23:18, 6 November 2010
Grace Sherwood
Grace Sherwood (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
- Featured article candidates/Grace Sherwood/archive1
- Featured article candidates/Grace Sherwood/archive2
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- Notified: Risker, Virginia WikiProject, Occult WikiProject,
I am nominating this featured article for review because see the talk page of this article and Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents/Plagiarism and copyright concerns on the main page, original nominator retired because of this unfortunate incident. Fails unstability as this mess is being sorted out. Secret account 03:25, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
This discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
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The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
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Back on topic: having a FAR page open may allow for a place to consolidate the work needed and get feedback from the copyvio people on how to proceed, and either 1) assure that we end up with a still-FA quality article if it can be salvaged, or 2) delist it if not. We have FA quality material with a copyvio problem: we need guidance on how to fix it, and time to do that. This could be the place. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:22, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
- I'll be willing to rewrite the article as long as I have guidance from the copyright experts, I don't think every source was checked so that also needs to be done. Secret account 04:34, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
- I have proposed a general solution for situations like this here which may be applicable in this case. Realistically, I think that we could probably find a copyvio in the history of a good 80% of FAs, so finding another path rather than considering all versions subsequent to a copyvio contaminated is probably essential to the continuation of the FA program. Most FACs have hundreds, if not thousands, of edits. Risker (talk) 04:51, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
- The copyvio people wish you wouldn't ask that kind of question. Okey if you really want to do the right thing you have a couple of options. You can start with deleting back to the pre copyvio content. You can then rebuild the article from the non copyvio content. However you need to credit the authors of that content. There are two ways of doing this.
- 1)A strict reading of the terms of use would allow you to forget about crediting the authors in any meaningful manner simply by including the article's own URL in an edit summery. I don't like this any more than you do and I will not be impressed if anyone actualy tries this.
- 2)A prefered option would be to copy and past the authors of all the deleted edits to a sub page of the talk page and link to that in an edit summery.
- It seems to me that some separation of attribution from article history, perhaps along those lines, ought to be implemented and automated anyway, saving all of this navel gazing about copyvios in the article history, which could then easily be deleted as necessary in cases like this. Malleus Fatuorum 22:53, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
- Alturnativly you can remove the copyvio content and anything derrived from it then delete everything between the adition of the content and the removal then follow the crediting instructions above.
- has to be said in an awful lot of cases we just remove the copyvio content from the current revision and try not to think about it.©Geni 05:14, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
- Rlevse gave me the offline sources of the article, let me see if I could work something out. Secret account 22:37, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
- I removed the section that had the copyvio notice on it. [1] SlimVirgin talk|contribs 22:46, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
- I'll research the removed section soon, and read the sources Rlevse gave me. I'm already started to trim some of the copyvio parts, and excess sources, looking at some of the sources. Secret account 22:57, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
- Remember: Everything in this edit that came from USA Today or the Old Donation Episcopal Church, and everything in this edit, however they may have been copyedited, adjusted, or moved around since, has to go. My estimation, more of the details of which are on User talk:Moonriddengirl, was that there are at least three sections of the article that are going to be subject to large scale removal of content. And Hans Adler, Moonriddengirl, and I only checked two of the sources. There may be yet more edits introducing non-free content that we're not allowed to copy, let alone modify and republish. To be strict and safe about this, you really should be starting from here, per our standard guidelines for this sort of thing, with all of these edits subject to revision deletion. Yes, I know. It's enough to make one weep. Uncle G (talk) 02:42, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
- There may be issues besides copyright violations. A lot of the article seems to be sourced to the Associated Press article in USA Today. [2] The AP source (and the source of a few of the other newspapers cited in the article) is a local woman, Belinda Nash, who engages in reenactments and fund raisers. It's not clear how much of what Belinda Nash says is historically accurate, and the single primary source I've found so far is scant on details (see George Lincoln Burr, p. 242ff; search for "whereas Grace Sherwood being suspected of witchcraft ...). Does anyone know of primary sources or scholarly secondary sources that offer the details Nash offers? SlimVirgin talk|contribs 03:54, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
- I told you so. I even told you that the society's journal was a better place to look. And indeed in you'll find an article there:
- Davis, Richard Beale (1957). "The Devil in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century". The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. 65 (2). Virginia Historical Society: 131–149.
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- Davis, Richard Beale (1957). "The Devil in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century". The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. 65 (2). Virginia Historical Society: 131–149.
- Other scholarly sources, unused by the problem article, include this one by a history professor:
- Sobel, Mechal (1989). "Black and White visions in and of America". The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth–Century Virginia. Princeton University Press. pp. 80–82, 266–267. ISBN 9780691006086.
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- Sobel, Mechal (1989). "Black and White visions in and of America". The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth–Century Virginia. Princeton University Press. pp. 80–82, 266–267. ISBN 9780691006086.
- The "ancient and knowing women" part, also originally taken from USA Today, but which is now cross-linked to something else, is actually better attributed to the court records themselves. James is apparently one source for those. Another is Burr 1914, pp. 442. It is a lightly edited collection of court records, with an introduction that discusses James, that is in fact cited by Davis 1957, pp. 142:
- That phrase doesn't occur in earlier collections of court records:
- For the folklore surrounding Sherwood, see the journal of the North Carolina Folklore Society:
- Oliver, Betty (1962). "Grace Sherwood of Princess Anne: She Was a Witch, They Said". North Carolina Folklore. 10: 36–39, 45.
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- Oliver, Betty (1962). "Grace Sherwood of Princess Anne: She Was a Witch, They Said". North Carolina Folklore. 10: 36–39, 45.
- There's a condensed, Readers' Digest, version of James in Chitwood 1905, pp. 87 that, being so, is an ideal source for an introduction section or a stub:
- Chitwood, Oliver Perry (1905). Justice in Colonial Virginia. Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science. Vol. 23 (reprinted by READ BOOKS, 2010 ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. ISBN 9781445578231.
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- Chitwood, Oliver Perry (1905). Justice in Colonial Virginia. Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science. Vol. 23 (reprinted by READ BOOKS, 2010 ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. ISBN 9781445578231.
- But the basic problem here is that you really cannot start from what you have now, in repairing this. See User:Uncle G/Grace Sherwood for a restart from the last known good version, which you are welcome to have at to your hearts' contents. Uncle G (talk) 14:28, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
- Uncle G, the theory you are putting forward is that the article, from the point of that edit, is "fruit from a poisoned tree" and thus everything subsequent to it must be deleted. Well, if that is your point of view, the same can be said of hundreds of thousands, if not over a million, of the articles on this project, and we need to go back and rewrite the entire encyclopedia from scratch, ensuring that every phrase and fact is sourced. I disagree with this point of view; I do not see the difference between unattributed non-free text additions and non-free images. We do not automatically delete unattributed non-free images immediately; we provide for a period for them to be attributed, and only after there is no attribution do we consider deleting them. There should be no difference in the way that we treat non-free text. Once it is attributed, the situation is resolved. Seriously though....either delete the whole article or permit proper attribution of the concerning text. The article may well not include all the information that one expects of an FA, but that has nothing to do with the way that we manage unattributed text. Risker (talk) 15:14, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
- I am not a lawyer and have never been anywhere near California, but I think according to current risk assessment there is probably no legal risk involved in starting with a copyvio, turning that into a text that mostly plagiarises the choice of ideas but uses completely different words and sentence structure and somewhat different order of presentation, and then removing the copyvio from the page history. (Even without the last step there is only little risk.) But this assessment may change in the future, as new case law comes out and lawyers invent new ways of making money from nuisance suits. If that happens, it is quite likely that copyvios that we didn't notice are much less of a problem than those which we were aware of, but addressed inadequately according to the latest legal theory that hasn't been shot down by a sufficiently high court yet. Apart from that I think it's a good general principle to deal with copyvios as Uncle G proposes. Otherwise those who introduce them can continue to think of the copyvios as positive content contributions of a type for which there is basically no alternative. But we need an environment in which competent editing is encouraged, even if it means we lose some incompetent editors who can do hardly more than copy and paste.
We used to have a deficit in terms of verifiability. Now the pendulum is on the other side. Truþ has become a four-letter word and is routinely used that way when an editor audaciously proposes to base our editorial judgement on something that is unanimously agreed to be true but for which there is no reliable source. (Note I am not talking about saying something explicitly without source.) Editors who distil all applicable reliable sources into an original encyclopedic article risk being accused of improper synthesis if any of the sentences properly combines information from two different sources. And I have seen plenty of tendentious editors get away with demanding categorically, with appeal to verifiability, that a specific formulation be used just because it happens to occur in a reliable source, or avoided because a reliable source avoids it. (E.g. calling Northern Ireland a country, or not calling the Genesis creation story a creation myth.) Thorough removal of copyvios and treatment of it to the point that all traces even of plagiarism are removed may not be strictly necessary, but I see it as a way to swing the pendulum back towards the middle. Hans Adler 16:02, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
- Yes, and you're wrong (and plucking statistics from thin air, by the way). It's very simple:
- this edit and this edit are someone else's text, that isn't free content. There are probably more such edits. Those are just the two that we found.
- We aren't permitted to copy, let alone to modify and republish, such things. They are subject to copyright and not licensed for such copying and modification.
- This is where, however, we modified and republished that content. It got shuffled around a bit, copy edited, and interspersed with other content. But much of it is still there even now, in both modified and original forms, now spread across three (one blanked) sections of the article. The other, interspersed, content may itself be a problem, too. We haven't really looked at it.
- We have a derived work, containing other people's stuff, copied, modified, and republished in a way that we're not allowed to do. We cannot compound the error by building on it further. Wikipedia editors lack the expertise to deal with the problem by carefully excising the problematic prose, checking whence everything originated and how it has been modified since. It's a hard thing to do and get right.
We know that there's this lack of expertise and ability. It's why our standard instructions are to re-start from the last non-infringing version, and have been for the better part of a decade. Picking apart a derived work to retain the non-infringing bits is a job for an expert. In this case, we haven't even determined the extents of the non-infringing bits. It's unlikely that it's just those two instances.
You don't correctly understand why we don't automatically delete non-free images, either. Part of that is because we accept a very limited and heavily circumscribed set of non-free images. But our primary purpose here is the generation of free content that we can give to the world. It's not the copying of multiple sentences of USA Today and then passing it off as free content because "it's attributed". Our mandate is the making of a free content encyclopaedia. The non-free stuff is constrained to be the part that simply cannot be regenerated as free. It doesn't extend to ordinary article prose giving the story of a historical figure. We can make free content prose to do that.
No amount of "But we can just attribute it!" overcomes the basics. This was stuff that wasn't available to be copied, modified, and republished. It has been copied, modified, and republished.
This argument that it's all alright, and copyright concerns go away, if we just attribute stuff that is copied when it's not permitted to copy it, is entirely bogus.
You're in numerous (but not good) company in your belief of this copyright myth. A lot of people believe it. Wikipedia suffers so much from that belief that we had MediaWiki:copyrightwarning and now have MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyrightwarning. But it's a myth nonetheless. I'm relieved of my duty to now go and write Project:Copyright guide for Arbitrators by the fact that Oregon State University debunks this myth, attorney Kathy Biehl debunks this myth, and Norbert F. Kugele (of Warner Norcross & Judd) debunks this myth and I can point to them (and a fair number of others) instead. ☺ Please learn that this myth is bunkum.
Uncle G (talk) 16:34, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
- Uncle G, I agree with you, but I also think that one of Risker's points was valid: If derivative work is correct and I am reading the article correctly, then the status of a text as a derivative work depends only on a comparison with the original, not on the process in which it was produced, even if that process was public and it went through stages that were derivative works. The problem is, it may not be fun to defend this theory against an expensive lawyer. Hans Adler 17:03, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
- You can't copyright the facts. Every single article on Wikipedia is a derivative work, based on many sources. We extract the relevant facts and present them in an original way. Now, in this case, the final output may not be original enough (although Talk:Grace_Sherwood#content_copied doesn't exactly show a lot), but that doesn't mean the method is any different from every other single article on Wikipedia. We start from point A and derive point B, the mistake made was to do this in on live Wikipedia, and not doing it offline - but that doesn't make point B a copyright violation. Point A may be a copyright violation, and is still being presented in our archives as free use, which is an issue, but there is no need to rewrite the article entirely. - hahnchen 22:08, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
- Coincidentally, there was a recent case in which 8 sentences was ruled fair use. Our policies on attributing text were not followed, but the "copyvio - nuke from orbit" view is way out of proportion. - hahnchen 22:17, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
- Of course, that is, as you say, coincidental. We can't extrapolate an "8 sentences is okay" generalization, since each case is decided individually on its own merits. As Stim noted, "[a]n infringement may be found based on several paraphrased passages of a few hundred words each, or just 20 words copied verbatim."(Stim, Richard (2007). Patent, Copyright & Trademark: An Intellectual Property Desk Reference (9 ed.). Nolo. p. 220. ISBN 1413306462.) Since we cannot predict what a court of law will find, we really can't afford to push any envelopes. Eight sentences constitutes a "copyright problem" in that non-free content has not been handled according to policies, and our copyright policy is clear on this: "Never use materials that infringe the copyrights of others. This could create legal liabilities and seriously hurt Wikipedia. If in doubt, write the content yourself, thereby creating a new copyrighted work which can be included in Wikipedia without trouble." (And, of course, attribution does not efface infringement: "Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission."[3])
That said, the question is what to do when content has been placed without authorization but subsequently modified into a form that would have been acceptable, had it only appeared that way to begin with. Technically, this could get us into trouble, if the original use of material is found to infringe. As Uncle G notes, we are creating a derivative work (by revising, annotating, elaborating or modifying the content). Ideally, we should rewrite such problem content from scratch. That said, many former copyright problems on Wikipedia are treated in exactly this way. IOW, I recognize the question, but I don't have the answer. :) --Moonriddengirl (talk) 16:00, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
- Of course, that is, as you say, coincidental. We can't extrapolate an "8 sentences is okay" generalization, since each case is decided individually on its own merits. As Stim noted, "[a]n infringement may be found based on several paraphrased passages of a few hundred words each, or just 20 words copied verbatim."(Stim, Richard (2007). Patent, Copyright & Trademark: An Intellectual Property Desk Reference (9 ed.). Nolo. p. 220. ISBN 1413306462.) Since we cannot predict what a court of law will find, we really can't afford to push any envelopes. Eight sentences constitutes a "copyright problem" in that non-free content has not been handled according to policies, and our copyright policy is clear on this: "Never use materials that infringe the copyrights of others. This could create legal liabilities and seriously hurt Wikipedia. If in doubt, write the content yourself, thereby creating a new copyrighted work which can be included in Wikipedia without trouble." (And, of course, attribution does not efface infringement: "Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission."[3])
- Coincidentally, there was a recent case in which 8 sentences was ruled fair use. Our policies on attributing text were not followed, but the "copyvio - nuke from orbit" view is way out of proportion. - hahnchen 22:17, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
- You can't copyright the facts. Every single article on Wikipedia is a derivative work, based on many sources. We extract the relevant facts and present them in an original way. Now, in this case, the final output may not be original enough (although Talk:Grace_Sherwood#content_copied doesn't exactly show a lot), but that doesn't mean the method is any different from every other single article on Wikipedia. We start from point A and derive point B, the mistake made was to do this in on live Wikipedia, and not doing it offline - but that doesn't make point B a copyright violation. Point A may be a copyright violation, and is still being presented in our archives as free use, which is an issue, but there is no need to rewrite the article entirely. - hahnchen 22:08, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
- Uncle G, I agree with you, but I also think that one of Risker's points was valid: If derivative work is correct and I am reading the article correctly, then the status of a text as a derivative work depends only on a comparison with the original, not on the process in which it was produced, even if that process was public and it went through stages that were derivative works. The problem is, it may not be fun to defend this theory against an expensive lawyer. Hans Adler 17:03, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
- I am not a lawyer and have never been anywhere near California, but I think according to current risk assessment there is probably no legal risk involved in starting with a copyvio, turning that into a text that mostly plagiarises the choice of ideas but uses completely different words and sentence structure and somewhat different order of presentation, and then removing the copyvio from the page history. (Even without the last step there is only little risk.) But this assessment may change in the future, as new case law comes out and lawyers invent new ways of making money from nuisance suits. If that happens, it is quite likely that copyvios that we didn't notice are much less of a problem than those which we were aware of, but addressed inadequately according to the latest legal theory that hasn't been shot down by a sufficiently high court yet. Apart from that I think it's a good general principle to deal with copyvios as Uncle G proposes. Otherwise those who introduce them can continue to think of the copyvios as positive content contributions of a type for which there is basically no alternative. But we need an environment in which competent editing is encouraged, even if it means we lose some incompetent editors who can do hardly more than copy and paste.
- Uncle G, the theory you are putting forward is that the article, from the point of that edit, is "fruit from a poisoned tree" and thus everything subsequent to it must be deleted. Well, if that is your point of view, the same can be said of hundreds of thousands, if not over a million, of the articles on this project, and we need to go back and rewrite the entire encyclopedia from scratch, ensuring that every phrase and fact is sourced. I disagree with this point of view; I do not see the difference between unattributed non-free text additions and non-free images. We do not automatically delete unattributed non-free images immediately; we provide for a period for them to be attributed, and only after there is no attribution do we consider deleting them. There should be no difference in the way that we treat non-free text. Once it is attributed, the situation is resolved. Seriously though....either delete the whole article or permit proper attribution of the concerning text. The article may well not include all the information that one expects of an FA, but that has nothing to do with the way that we manage unattributed text. Risker (talk) 15:14, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
- I told you so. I even told you that the society's journal was a better place to look. And indeed in you'll find an article there:
- I can't see any way round deleting most of the article. The copyvio was introduced during its five-fold expansion for DYK. Now we're intelligent mammals with opposable thumbs and all that, we could just take the chunk of text that was introduced here, work with it on a private text editor and repost was remains once the infringing material has been removed. Except we can't, because that would infringe the copyright of the original editor: only he can make that sort of an adjustment to put back some of what must be removed. So it's an all or nothing situation, sorry. Physchim62 (talk) 16:24, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
Is the copyright issue not a bit of a red herring now? Key parts of the article are based on an Associated Press article that was referenced 29 times, and it based its article on a local woman who was trying to raise money. Shouldn't we use Uncle G's academic sources to rewrite it, for reasons unrelated to copyright? SlimVirgin talk|contribs 17:10, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
- I agree there. Secret account 17:59, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
- I just emailed Old Donation Episcopal Church for permission to use their content, if they say yes I would place a OTRS ticket on it, if they say no delete the article and start from scratch. Secret account 16:36, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
For what it's worth, what I've gotten from the historians for User:Uncle G/Grace Sherwood is subtly different to what is in Grace Sherwood. She wasn't tried three times. She was tried once. The other two (actually four — another difference) actions involving the Sherwoods were where they brought suit against someone else. She wasn't forgotten until Louisa Venable Kyle wrote a children's book about her, but in fact was remembered in folklore for three centuries. Her "good name" wasn't "restored" because she didn't have a bad one, even in the first place. At least one historian concludes that Virginians of the time didn't actually widely condemn witchcraft, or Sherwood in particular. And all of this "Before the day be through" stuff appears, since I've yet to find it anywhere else, to come from the re-enactors. Uncle G (talk) 11:37, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
- Note
I have restored the section Grace Sherwood#Cultural background – after removing the alleged plagiarism and claimed copyright violations. -- Petri Krohn (talk) 21:11, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
- Thanks for working on it, Petri, but it's still problematic. For example, the sentence: "Unlike Massachusetts, made infamous by the Salem witch trials of 1692–1693, Virginia never experienced a "witch craze"" is sourced to four separate sources, none of them really appropriate:
- 2006 Associated Press story in USA Today, which does say it, but they are not historians: "Virginia never had a witch craze like that in Massachusetts, where 19 colonists were hanged for witchcraft in Salem Town in 1692."
- 1934 Richmond Times Dispatch story, not online.
- Something from the cellar by Ivor Noël Hume, Colonial Williamsburg, 2005, pp. 86–89, and I can't see where it says that.
- Someone's MA thesis, no page number, so it's hard to check; and is an MA thesis a reliable source?
- The MA thesis is actually a source for the next sentence, rather than the source that's there, and it uses identical wording without in-text attribution:
- MA thesis: "To protect the social fragility of their colony, Virginia’s political and religious leaders consciously chose to prosecute offenses that they felt threatened the social cohesion of the colony, such as fornication, gossip, and slander, and dismissed those, such as witchcraft, that threatened to tear it apart."
- Wikipedia: "Virginia’s political and religious leaders consciously chose to prosecute offenses that they felt threatened the social cohesion of the colony, such as fornication, gossip, and slander, and dismissed those, such as witchcraft, that threatened to tear it apart."
- The latter is sourced not to the MA thesis, but to Bond, Edward (2000). Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia. Mercer University Press, pp. 53, 91, 125 (but which page?).
- SlimVirgin talk|contribs 22:35, 6 November 2010 (UTC)