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Wikipedia:Verbatim copying

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Wikipedia does not give legal advice. See also wikipedia:copyrights

There are two means to reuse Wikipedia articles:

For the purposes of this discussion, Wikipedia is considered to be a Collection of Documents, where each Document comprises:

Other content, such as the sidebar links, the Wikipedia logo, and so forth, are not considered part of the Document, though you may consider them to be "cover pages" for the Document. An article's talk page is not considered part of the Document.

A verbatim copy of a Wikipedia Document is copying that qualifies under section 2 (verbatim copying) of the GFDL.

Table of contents

Webpage copies

For verbatim copying on the internet (IE, setting up mirrors of Wikipedia), the following restrictions apply:

Title

You may not change the Title. In this document, the title is Wikipedia:Verbatim copying.

Title Page

The "Title Page" is the text just below the title, before the start of the article proper. This is currently "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia", but was previously (briefly) "Find out how you can help support Wikipedia's phenomenal growth", etc.

Where Wikipedia has imported text from a third party, such as Nupedia, the Title Page may additionally extend to some italicised block text immediately after the title.

Main Text

You may not add, remove, or change any content or links within the Main Text itself, except:

  1. Optionally, you may change links to other Wikipedia articles to point to local copies of the equivalent Wikipedia article. (legally questionable)
  2. Optionally, you may remove links to Wikipedia articles that have not been copied locally. (legally questionable)

Here are the legally questionable bits:

  1. The change of links to reference local copies may be excused as a side effect of copying - semantically the document is identical, even if syntactically the raw HTML is subtly different.
  2. The removal of links to non-copied articles may be excused as a side effect of your use of section 6 (collections of documents) - the act of "extraction" includes the act of removing those links.

History Subunit

As the GFDL was never intended for wiki articles, things get complicated. Some allege that the "page history" link is the history subunit and that you should include this "by reference" by linking to it. However, the "page history" is not in the correct format for the GFDL, is missing information that would be required under the GFDL if it were the history subunit, and is not "Entitled" History. Further, there has been no official declaration from either Bomis or the Wikimedia foundation that the "page history" is intended to represent the history subunit.

As a result, some allege that you may ignore the "page history" for the purposes of verbatim copying. If the text includes a section Entitled "History", then you should of course copy that along with the rest of the body text.

License and Copyright Statement

Here you have more freedom, chiefly because Wikipedia's current License and Copyright Statement is itself questionable. However:

Aggregation and cover pages

Under section 7 (aggregation with independant works) you may aggregate the Document with other separate and independent documents or works. Solely for the purposes of this list:

The use of embedding as a form of aggregation is dubious because it could equally be considered to be the creation of a derivative work. You can support the "aggregation" interpretation by designing your webpage to logically seperate the verbatim copy of the Wikipedia page from the rest of your content, by use of colour, lines, and other markup.

You could also consider brief headers and footers on a HTML page to be "cover pages", as discussed in section 3, though again this is legally questionable. The GFDL states that "copying with changes limited to the covers [...] can be treated as verbatim copying [...]".

If you aggregate Wikipedia content with your own content, you may claim a compilation copyright for the whole. This means that others cannot copy the whole without your permission. The GFDL forbids you from using the compilation copyright to restrict the rights of users of the Wikipedia parts of your aggregation.

Printable copies

If you distribute a Wikipedia article in printed form, you cannot "link" to a local copy of the GFDL. Instead, you must additionally print out a copy of Wikipedia:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License for each copy of the Wikipedia article you distribute, and distribute them together. We recommend you distribute the "printable version" of the article, and the text of the GFDL.

If you are distributing a selection of Wikipedia articles in printed form, you must include one copy of the GFDL in each selection.

As with webpage copying, there are potential issues to do with the "page history", which some allege counts as the history subunit. However, printing the entire page history would be unreasonable, so we recommend that you do not do so.

Copying in quantity

If you are copying more than 100 copies, then section 3 (copying in quantity) comes into play. Chiefly this means that you must include either:

Relying on Wikipedia is legally questionable because pages on Wikipedia may be deleted from public view, or Wikipedia as a whole may be taken down for legal or financial reasons. However, it is clearly the easiest solution.

If you choose not to rely on Wikipedia, download the database, strip it of any content that you are not redistributing, and either distribute it with your copies, or else host it on a webserver for a year. Alternatively, if you are only copying a handful of pages, it may be easier to just host the HTML of the pages you are copying.


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