Definitely unattributed in-wiki copying from articles on the seasons; the website is likely a backwards copy of those.
Long-winded explanation
So the second and third seasons were added by MrHunter25 in 2021, while season four was added by Abu calaf in 2024. All this text is extremely similar (~95%) to the text on the corresponding pages for seasons 2, 3, and 4 on the amusingly named funwithvikings website. Although it wasn't covered by the copyvio tag, our season one section is also similar to the corresponding page on season one; our text was added by Mr Hunter. Two users three years apart copying from the same website seems a little odd, which makes me wonder about a backwards copy. It turns out Abu calaf in fact copied the section he added from Vikings season 4; at first it appears that Mr Hunter could not have done this, though he says he did, per Oona Wikiwalker's discussion with him on his talk page, but if you actually look at the source code of Vikings season 2's revision from that day [1], you can see that the episode summaries are in fact there, and would have shown up there at the time, available to be copied, but now appear suppressed when viewing the old revision, due to some kind of effect the page move had on the template (see this edit). The summaries themselves were added to the season 2 article in 2014. (Checking the version history of Vikings season 3 and Vikings season 1, we can reasonably assume that the corresponding sections on the Ragnar Lothbrok article were copied from them) The Internet Archive's record of the funwithvikings website is very patchy, but doesn't have records before January 2022, although they claim to have been last updated in 2020. Interestingly, their main page copies from and correctly attributes Wikipedia.
Since everything seems to have been copied from our episode summaries on Vikings seasons 1, 2, 3, and 4, it's best we look at the history of those articles and when the episode summaries were written. Season one: March 2014, by Pejorative.majeure — season two: March 2014, Pejorative.majeure — season three: gradually added by IPs in 2015 — season four: gradually added by various users in 2016. The fact that our descriptions for seasons 3 & 4 grew naturally but that the viking website's summaries are extremely close suggests backwards copy on season three and four. Given that, it seems very likely that season one and two are also backwards copies.
Should I just tag the seasons thus and let it go at that, or should we nicely ask them to credit Wikipedia so we don't have to go down this rabbit hole again? Oona Wikiwalker (talk) 00:19, 25 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
No worries. I'm not a CP regular and don't know how to proceed from here, so we should probably just leave it to the clerks. Cremastra (talk) 01:12, 25 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
