This page is a policy on the Simple English Wikipedia. Many people agree with it. They see it as a standard idea that all users should normally follow. When changing this page (except for minor errors like typos), please check that other people agree with your changes. Use the talk page when you are not sure or when you want to suggest a change. |
This page in a nutshell: Do not add words here that are copied from somewhere else, unless you are allowed to under the GFDL licence. |
Important note: The Wikimedia Foundation does not own copyright on Wikipedia article texts and illustrations. It is therefore useless to email our contact addresses asking for permission to reproduce articles or images, even if the rules of operation of your company or school mandate that you ask web site operators before copying their content.
The only contents about the use of which you should contact the Wikimedia Foundation are the trademarked Wikipedia/Wikimedia logos.
Permission to reproduce content under the license and technical conditions applicable to Wikipedia (see below and en:Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks) has already been granted to everyone without request by the authors of individual articles and images, at least unless they violated Wikipedia rules by uploading copyrighted material without authorization or under incorrect licensing terms. For permission to use it outside these terms, one must contact all the volunteer authors of the text or illustration in question.
When someone makes a creation (like a book, movie, picture, song or website), they can say how this creation should be used. This is called copyright, and there are laws that protect it. For someone else to use the creation, they need to get permission from the creator or pay a fee.
Laws about copyright were created so that people who write books or songs or make web pages or movies could get money for their work.
Someone writes a book and want to sell it. People who want to read the book have to pay the author to get copies of it. He would not want someone else to sell a stolen version of the book, and get money for the work he had done. The author also wants people to know that he was the first person who could write a book like that one; if the book is good, it means the author is good at writing; people who know the author is good at writing may hire the author to write things for them.
The rule of all the Wikipedias, including this one, is that nothing in the Wikipedia can be copyrighted by someone else. The exception is if Wikipedia editors (including named and unnamed editors) have permission to use it. This means that we are only allowed to copy things from books or from other web pages into the Wikipedia if the writer has said that anyone can copy these things and make changes to them.
The text contained in Wikipedia is copyrighted (automatically, under the Berne Convention) by Wikipedia contributors and licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The full text of this license is at Wikipedia:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License.