 | This page in a nutshell:
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| Wikipedia copyright |
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| Policy |
| Guidelines |
| Advice |
| Processes |
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Often, people wish to"donate" copyrighted materials toWikipedia. These materials may be text (including monographs, articles, etc.) or images (including photographs). They may or may not already be posted on some other website. 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 thepublic domain, but the focus is on copyrighted materials, because they raise more complicated issues.)
When you contribute material to Wikipedia, you are not giving it exclusive use on just Wikipedia. You still retain any rights you previously held, but you also give non-exclusive license underCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA) and theGNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). These licenses allowanyone—not just Wikipedia—to share, distribute, transmit, and adapt your work, provided that you are attributed as the author.Wikipedia does not accept material that claims "this can be used in Wikipedia, but not anywhere else or in derivative works." Also, because some derivative works may be commercial, we cannot accept materials that are licensed only for educational use or even for general non-commercial use.
Note, too, thatthe Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use allow text by others or which you have co-authored with others to be imported under CC BY-SA or CC BY-SA-compatible license alone, without need to verify compatibility with GFDL, but text for which you hold the copyright yourself must be licensed under both CC BY-SA and GFDL.
Please be aware that the content 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 licenses are conditioned on our providing that credit, and ensuring that you are not held liable in any sense for the changes others make to your work.
Please note 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 CC BY-SA or GFDL.
If it is important that your work remain unchanged, please read the guidelines for our sister project,Wikisource, which may be better suited to host such work.
If you arenot the copyright holder of the material you cannot donate rights to Wikipedia! The last thing we want arecopyright problems: we try to be ruthless in rooting out material where there is even the slightest question about our right to use it.
For example:
Wikipedia is not a universal compendium. There are things we include and things we don't. Probably the best explanation of this is at the page "Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not". In particular, we try not to include content that is below anencyclopedic level of notability. We probably don't need an article about your college club (unless it happens to be something like theOxford Union). On the other hand, we are open to encyclopedic articles, withcited sources and written from aneutral point of view (NPOV). The content of most websites, as written, usually does not meet these criteria, so it may be best to simply paraphrase, rather than copy verbatim. This also avoids the need to re-license the content.
Wikipedia is not aprimary source, and does not publish new and untested research and claims. Our position on such material is described more thoroughly at "Wikipedia:No original research". In brief, Wikipedia at a minimum will not consider covering a matterat least until it has a proven history of gaining significant attention by significant third party sources, or (for matters testable by science) by the global scientific community. Therefore if your work is unscrutinized, unpublished, theoretical, cutting-edge, or otherwise not covered in depth through otherreliable sources, you will need to seek other avenues to publish it first. Alternatively, you might consider publishing it atWikiversity, if the topic is suitable for that project.
Contributions of media material (images, videos and the like) are by their nature less likely to be "original research" in this sense; however they would still be covered by the same policy in the same way.
If you have taken photographs that you think would be useful to Wikipedia, you canupload them toWikimedia Commons (to activate your account in Commons, login using the same credentials you use in Wikipedia on Commons), where they can be used by any Wikimedia project, including Wikipedia. Please, if you are uploading images, become familiar with theimage copyright tags. If you are the photographer, you will probably want to use one of the following:
{{CC BY 4.0}} or{{CC BY-SA 4.0}} to retain copyright, but license your image under aCreative Commonslicense (note, not all CC licenses are accepted here, non-commercial and non-derivative licenses are not accepted; earlier versions of CC BY-SA are accepted){{Attribution}} or{{CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat}} to retain copyright, but allow the image to be used freely subject to certain restrictions, such as acknowledgment. Note that any restrictions cannot include terms from unacceptable licenses, such as "no derivative works" or "no commercial use."{{CC0}} or{{PD-self}} to release your image into thepublic domain.Contributions can also bedual-licensed, being subject to two different licenses, and allowing users to choose which one they want to use your content under.
We encourage you to place a descriptive caption and source information (such as when and how it was taken) onto theImage description page in addition to the image copyright tag.
One simple way to grant permission to copy material already online is to put that permission explicitly on the site where that material is posted. This is commonly known as a "copyleft" notice. This notice must state that your site (or portions of your site) are licensed under theCreative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA) and theGNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts) or that it is in thepublic domain. For text, a good statement of release might read:
If you do not wish to retain any rights to the work, you may instead release it under the Creative Commons Zero Waiver, which effectively releases your work into the public domain:
If you verify text by placing a note at the website, you may wish to use{{Text release}} to make sure that your release is documented at the talk page of the article. Instructions for using that template can be found atTemplate:Text release. Please do not use this template if the release isnot published at your website, as the text will need to be removed.
If you would like to allow Wikipedia or another Wikimedia site to use your content, be it text or images, but don't want to put a license statement on the website, youstill must release it under the free licenses noted above and can do so in the following ways:
{{Permission pending}} on the image page.If you would like to license your site's content under a free license, but don't have any particular articles in mind to put the content in, you can follow the above directions, and list your site on one of the following pages, based on the type of content and license:
If you have any further questions, seeWikipedia:Media copyright questions.