Close paraphrasing can take a page down the same day it goes up, however accurate and fully cited the draft is — not for what it claims, but for how closely its sentences track the press release, the annual report or the company's own website behind them. The tool that catches it first is usually a bot, not a person.
Earwig's Copyvio Detector runs automatically against nearly every new article and every edit inside Articles for Creation, comparing the text against the open web and returning a similarity score in seconds. A human still confirms the result, but the automated pass happens before anyone has necessarily read the draft for content at all. A high score is usually enough to stop a review cold, whatever the sourcing underneath looks like.
The pattern shows up most in drafts written to a brief that says something like 'stick to the facts, no promotional language.' Writers follow that instruction by editing the source's own sentence rather than replacing it — a synonym here, a reordered clause there, an adjective dropped. The vocabulary changes more than the structure does, and structure is most of what similarity detection is built to catch.
Take a press release that reads: 'Founded in 2011 by two former engineers, the company reported revenue of forty million dollars in its most recent fiscal year.' A close paraphrase keeps the same bones: 'The company, started in 2011 by two former engineers, posted forty million dollars in revenue for its latest fiscal year.' A genuine rewrite starts from the facts instead of the sentence: 'Two former engineers founded the company in 2011; revenue reached forty million dollars in the year that followed, according to its filing.' Same information, a different architecture, because it was built from the facts rather than edited down from someone else's sentence.
Even when a citation is given, wording that stays very close to the original can still amount to plagiarism and, separately, to copyright infringement — however accurate or well-sourced the underlying facts are.
The consequence runs on its own track, separate from anything a reviewer decides about tone or notability. A page flagged for close paraphrasing can be blanked or revision-deleted the same day, sourcing and all, because copyright takedowns carry their own priority and skip the ordinary review queue entirely. A draft can clear every notability question a reviewer might raise and still lose weeks to a rewrite that a different first draft would never have needed.
The habit that avoids this has little to do with vocabulary. Read the source once, close the tab, and write the sentence from the fact rather than from the words still sitting on the screen. A phrase genuinely worth keeping — a distinctive line, a direct claim from an executive — belongs in quotation marks with attribution, not folded into the prose disguised as something original.
An article built this way from the start rarely gets flagged twice. It reads less like something lifted and more like something written, which is what a reviewer — human or automated — was checking for from the first pass.
