Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials

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Often, people wish to "donate" copyrighted materials to Wikipedia. These materials may be text (including monographs, articles, etc.) or images (including photographs). They may or may not already be posted on some other web site. They may or may not actually be appropriate for inclusion in Wikipedia. This page exists to provide some guidance in these matters.

(Most of what is on this page also applies to work in the public domain, but the focus is on copyrighted materials, because they raise more complicated issues.)

Contents

[edit] What it means to donate material to Wikipedia

When you contribute material to Wikipedia, you are not necessarily giving us exclusive use of it. You still retain any rights you previously held, but you are giving non-exclusive license under GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Note that there is no way to say "you can use this in Wikipedia, but not in Wikipedia mirrors and forks or other derivative works." Also, because some derivative works may be commercial, we cannot accept materials that are licensed only for education use or even for general non-commercial use.

Please be aware that the text you donate is subject to continuous editing by the Wikipedia community. It may be added to, subtracted from, rearranged, illustrated, split into multiple articles, translated into other languages, and otherwise changed beyond your expectations. Your contribution will always be part of the page history, so you retain credit for your work -- our license requires us to provide that credit, and to ensure that you are not held liable in any sense for the changes others make to your work. Do remember that one of the benefits of this freedom to edit is that you are freely able to incorporate the improvements that others make into your own website or source work, so long as it remains under the GFDL.

If it is important for some reason that your work remain intact, please read the guidelines for our sister projects at Wikisource and Wikibooks.

[edit] Why we cannot take certain donations

Let's get the negatives out of the way first.

[edit] You cannot donate what someone else owns

If you are not the copyright holder of the material you cannot donate rights to Wikipedia! The last thing we want are copyright problems: we try to be ruthless in rooting out material where there is even question about our right to use it.

For example:

  • Most web pages do not allow their material to be freely copied. Unless the material either is public domain, carries a copyleft notice compatible with GFDL, or you have explicit permission to use it, please don't copy and paste from other web sites into Wikipedia.
  • If you are the original author but the rights have been assigned to your publisher, you have given up the ability to license the work to us.

[edit] Wikipedia is not a universal compendium

Wikipedia is not a universal compendium. There are things we include and things we don't. Probably the best explanation of this is "Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not". In particular, we try not to include content that is below an encyclopedic level of notability. We probably don't need an article about your college club (unless it happens to be something like the Oxford Union). On the other hand, we are open to encyclopedic articles, with cited sources and written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), about even rather obscure towns and villages. See Wikipedia:Museum projects for some related thoughts.

[edit] Wikipedia does not publish original research

Wikipedia is not a primary source, which publishes new or untested research; our position is described at "Wikipedia:No original research". If your work is theoretical, cutting-edge, unpublished, or otherwise unverifiable through other sources, you will need to seek other avenues to publish it first.

[edit] Please consider creating a Wikipedia account

Please consider creating yourself a Wikipedia account and logging in whenever you are writing in Wikipedia. It makes it much easier for anyone who wants to discuss your edits, verify that you have the rights to the material you are donating, etc.

[edit] Donating your photographs

If you have taken photographs that you think would be useful to Wikipedia, you can scan them and upload them. We prefer JPEG and PNG to other formats. Please, if you are uploading images, become familiar with the image copyright tags. If they are your own photos, you will probably use one of the following:

  • {{GFDL-self}} to retain copyright, but license the image under GFDL
  • {{PD-self}} or {{PD-user|user name here}} to release your image into the public domain.
  • {{cc-by-2.5}} or {{cc-by-sa-2.5}} to license your image under the Creative Commons License (note, not all CC licenses are accepted here). Contributions may be dual-licensed under the GFDL and the CC.
  • {{Attribution}} or {{CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat|...}} to retain copyright, but allow the image to be used freely subject to certain restrictions, such as acknowledgment.

We encourage you to place a descriptive caption and source information (such as when and how it was taken) onto the Image description page in addition to the image copyright tag.

[edit] Granting us permission to copy material already on line

One simple way to grant permission to copy material already on line is to put that permission explicitly on the site where that material is posted. This is commonly known as a "copyleft" notice. For example, you might place your site (or portions of your site) under GFDL or public domain, and post a notice to that effect; you might also explicitly indicate somewhere on your site that Wikipedia has permission to use material from your site.

If you want to grant Wikipedia permission to use material from your site, but don't want to place a statement to that effect on your site, you can leave us a notice to that effect on the article's talk page (or on your user page if your site covers a number of topics). This does require that your site have a posted email contact, or some other similar means for us to verify that we really do have the relevant permission. Someone from Wikipedia will then contact that email address to confirm the permission, and we will be able to add your site to a list of those from which our editors may freely draw.

In either of the above scenarios, the relevant source should be added to one of the following:

[edit] Copying your own material from another source into Wikipedia

If you wish to copy your own material from another source into Wikipedia:

  • Give some thought in advance to whether the material is appropriate to Wikipedia. If it is, great, but many efforts to copy from other sites run into problems with our "neutral point of view" policy.
  • Be explicit about where the material comes from. See Wikipedia:Cite sources for the details of how best to do this; every article has, or should have, a "references" section, and this source should now be listed as a reference. This helps us enormously in preventing two possible confusions:
    1. We won't think this is a stealthy plagiarism.
    2. We can work out that your site/book/article/whatever is not plagarizing from us!
  • If the source from which you are taking explicitly posts permission to reuse their material say so in your edit summary.
  • If the source from which you are taking does not explicitly post permission to reuse their material, then your edit summary should include the words "see talk", and you should explain the situation more fully on the talk/discussion page.

[edit] Related pages

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