Wikipedia talk:Copyrights

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Related:

Wikipedia:Media copyright questions - ask all questions about whether you can use an image here
Wikipedia talk:Copyrights/Credit repair - case study relating to external links and attribution
Wikipedia talk:Copyright violations on history pages
WikiProject Copyright Cleanup – see how you can help

Commons:Licensing – Related at Wikimedia Commons

Potential citogenesis situation

What do you do when there's a potential unknown Citogenesis situation due to the point of reference being excluded from archive.org? The org's official website is excluded from archive.org

https://copyvios.toolforge.org/?lang=en&project=wikipedia&title=&oldid=693335104&use_engine=0&use_links=0&turnitin=0&action=compare&url=https%3A%2F%2Foutsidein.org%2Fabout-us%2Fhistory%2F

The source includes the article subject's official website, but some of the matching part was not sourced to the company website. The first paragraph in the organization's current website is pretty much the same as the Wikipedia's version 9 years ago. Looking through the edit history, the organization was heavily involved in messing with the article in the past, so they're quite aware of the page's existence.

This can make it look like Wikipedia ripped it from them, but it might be that their most recent page was in-part written from Wikipedia. Who knows. Since that part of Wikipedia was initially written by an establish user rather than company PR, it looks like part of Wikipedia page might have been used by the organization to write their current page. What should we do in cases like this? I reworded that part of the sentence, but maybe that was unnecessary. Graywalls (talk) 04:34, 7 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It can be tricky. I have seen a case where a website seems to have copied from WP very shortly after the content first appeared on WP (fooled me for a while), a case where various changes to a web site and a WP article appear to have been copied back and forth, and a case where content on an academic website was apparently not created until a couple of years after the same content appeared in WP, but the website creator insisted that they had originated the content and owned the copyright. Even if you are very sure that someone has copied from WP, if they are insistent that they do own the copyright, it may not be worth fighting. After all, WP contents are not set in concrete. Donald Albury 16:53, 7 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Just to be clear, nobody challenged anything on copyright ground, but I can see something like this triggering a copyvio detector. Graywalls (talk) 02:10, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Seems like 'be insistent' is a strategy to obfuscate ownership on every website ever. When WP legal calls to nudge them about our earliest version being older than theirs, they can insistently claim seniority, and say that their last CTO disallowed ia_archiver ever since the company was founded, and when the new CTO took over, he allowed it for the first time. And when did that happen? Oh, uh, um, just a couple of months after Wikipedia's first version of it in the history. Just coincidence; truly. Mathglot (talk) 05:34, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Graywalls: I think you are describing a {{Backwards copy}}. In 15+ years it only has 1,900 usages, but it probably should have a million. -- GreenC 06:02, 8 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Attribution bot proposal

Editors interested in the COPYRIGHTS topic might also be interested in this Attribution bot proposal. This grew out of a particular case of translated articles needing missing attribution repair, but that is merely one case out of many such. A bot or other automated procedure would help us deal with this more efficiently (or even at all, in some cases). Mathglot (talk) 05:14, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Copylink Q - original vs. reprinted version

Hi all, feel free to route me elsewhere if I'm in the wrong place. Had a question about norms/standards for linking when there are multiple versions of a work. I'm using a 1971 article by Frank Bowling from ARTnews as a citation in the Melvin Edwards article - a number of historians and critics have cited and quoted the piece in the context of Edwards' career, and I'm including the original article as the underlying source of the quoted content, with attributions to the authors who quoted it. But there are at least two versions of the article freely available online. The article was republished in 2017 by ARTnews on their website with a new introduction (link); and the original article was republished by Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in New York (link), presumably in conjunction with this group exhibition in 2014 that included Bowling, the main place Bowling is referenced on the gallery's website. All the sources that quote the article are quoting the original source (with the original page numbers, etc.), so I assume the original is preferred if possible. But I really can't tell if the gallery link for the original is a copyright violation or not - the gallery published it for an exhibition of Bowling's work during his life and is well known for working with historical black artists like Bowling, so I presume they had his permission as the copyright holder, but I obviously have no way to know for sure. Should I just defer to using the free, republished version from ARTnews? (it's also way more accessible as it's plain text and not a scanned PDF)

Thanks for any insight! 19h00s (talk) 19:29, 16 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Edit request 7 February 2025

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Description of suggested change: Please replace the huge disambiguation hatnote with a link to disambiguation pages:

Diff: Where it is:

{{Redirect|WP:C||Wikipedia:Consensus|and|Wikipedia:Civility|and|Wikipedia:Categorization|and|Wikipedia:Canvassing|and|Wikipedia:WikiProject Countries|and|Wikipedia:WikiProject Council|and|Wikipedia:C-class}} {{Redirect|WP:COPY||Wikipedia:Copyright problems|and|Wikipedia:Basic copyediting|and|Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia}}

please use, instead:

{{Redirect-multi|2|WP:C|WP:COPY}}

Compare the result, before:

and after:

Thanks. fgnievinski (talk) 02:45, 7 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 02:02, 8 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Edit request 28 February 2025

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Description of suggested change:

Change "fair use guidelines" to "Wikipedia's non-free content use policy" in the last sentence of the first paragraph of WP:COPY#Guidelines for images and other media files. Wikipedia's non-free content use policy is more restrictive than fair use by design; so, just meeting fair use guidelines doesn't automatically make something Wikipedia policy compliant. It's an important distinction to make because many users mistakenly assume fair use and non-free content use are one and the same even though they're not; meeting the fair use guidelines is a prerequisite for satisfying Wikipedia policy, but there's more involved than just that.

Diff:

-- Marchjuly (talk) 01:20, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 16:48, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Dark mode adapted header

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Please replace the header styling at the top of the page with this CSS:

Important note: The Wikimedia Foundation does not own copyright on Wikipedia article texts or illustrations. It is therefore pointless to email our contact addresses asking for permission to reproduce articles or images, even if rules at your company, school, or organization mandate that you ask web site operators before copying their content.

The only Wikipedia content you should contact the Wikimedia Foundation about are the trademarked Wikipedia/Wikimedia logos, which are not freely usable without permission.

Permission to reproduce and modify text on Wikipedia has already been granted to anyone anywhere by the authors of individual articles as long as such reproduction and modification complies with licensing terms (see below and Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks for specific terms). Images may or may not permit reuse and modification; the conditions for reproduction of each image should be individually checked. The only exceptions are those cases in which editors have violated Wikipedia policy by uploading copyrighted material without authorization, or with copyright licensing terms which are incompatible with those Wikipedia authors have applied to the rest of Wikipedia content. While such material is present on Wikipedia (before it is detected and removed), it will be a copyright violation to copy it. For permission to use it, one must contact the owner of the copyright of the text or illustration in question; often, but not always, this will be the original author.

If you wish to reuse content from Wikipedia, first read the Reusers' rights and obligations section. You should then read the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License and the GNU Free Documentation License.

Specifically, change this:

Aasim (話す（はなす）) 17:38, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 18:06, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

One more thing: Can you remove the "black" part from the border so it is actually visible in dark mode? So that it reads border: 1px solid; Aasim (話す（はなす）) 20:49, 13 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Reopening to get further attention. The style should read

background-color: #ff000010; color: inherit; border: 1px solid; padding: 1ex; margin: 1ex; margin-right: 20em; min-width: 20em;

(noticed the removed word "black" because the border color is implied). Aasim (話す（はなす）) 17:08, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done that. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 21:55, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Edit request 2 August 2025

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More professional looking, also used it to test the template's application and looks great for readability:

See at User:Waddie96/sandbox2. May have to protect Template:Colored box in case.

Diff:

waddie96 ★ (talk) 00:34, 2 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A rewrite this substantial feels like something that should be discussed somewhere like the village pump first before being submitted for an admin to implement. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 03:43, 2 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) § c-Voorts-20250803173200-Policy proposal discussion alert

waddie96 ★ (talk) 19:04, 3 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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Re-open—consensus achieved @Pppery. waddie96 ★ (talk) 21:18, 3 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 21:19, 3 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Pppery Oh shucks I must have just replied as you copied it and replied, but I changed the link to

[[Wikipedia:Copyright#Reusers' rights and obligations|Reusers' rights and obligations]]

and this one

[[foundationsite:about/press/|Foundation:Press contacts]]

that has been dead for a while. waddie96 ★ (talk) 21:24, 3 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I just made a change as one of the links had expired a while ago. waddie96 ★ (talk) 21:19, 3 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 21:28, 3 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Pppery and Waddie96: Slight nitpick, but can I suggest that "For members of the media, see Foundation:Press contacts, others see Wikipedia:Contact us." be changed to "For members of the media, see Foundation:Press contacts; others, see Wikipedia:Contact us." The original wording reads like a comma splice to me, which a semicolon would avoid. SnowFire (talk) 00:58, 4 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Done * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:31, 4 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed minor re-wording

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I approve of the above change, but I'd like to reduce the SMOG reading score without changing the structure or meaning.

According to this online tool, the box at the top of this policy today is SMOG index 16.17 (undergraduate-level reading). I propose the following revision:

Important note:

Please do not ask the Wikimedia Foundation for consent to reuse article text or images.: The Foundation does not own that content and cannot consent. Not even if your organization needs consent from website operators before copying text.

When to contact the Wikimedia Foundation: The only Wikipedia content that needs consent from the Wikimedia Foundation is use of its trademarked logos. These logos are not freely licensed. They need written consent for reuse.; For members of the press, see Foundation:Press contacts. Others see Wikipedia:Contact us.

Reusing article text: You already have consent to edit and reuse article text under open content licenses by the authors, as long as your use complies with the licensing terms, gives proper attribution, and licenses any changes under the same terms.; If you wish to reuse content from Wikipedia, read this first. Then review the licenses: the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License and the GNU Free Documentation License.

Reusing images: Images on Wikipedia are not always covered by the same license as article text. Each image has its own license. Some images are freely reusable. Others are restricted or non-free. These may not be reused or modified without explicit consent from the original author. If an image was uploaded against Wikipedia policy, reusing it could infringe copyright.

According to the same online tool, this revision has a SMOG index of 12.36, which would be what Americans call 7th-grade English.—S Marshall T/C 12:28, 5 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 14:41, 10 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

Please change consent back to permission since: Essentially, permission is the specific act of getting authorization, while consent can be a more general term for allowing usage., and it is the more common in the English language as it relates to copyright.[1]
Knit picky, but small grammar correction now that changes:

Please keep in the third-person for formality:

A bad link is a link exactly like this (MOS:LINK MOS:EGG):

Thank you. waddie96 ★ (talk) 18:24, 10 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Partly done I've addressed the specific issues you pointed out, while also trying to keep the language less technical akin to S Marshall's proposed style, and resulting in a SMOG score of 13.97 as opposed to 14.64 in your version. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 05:10, 11 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Edit request 2025-08-10

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Please merge version at User:Matrix/sandbox4 for dark mode compatibility. —Matrix(!) _{ping one}^{when replying} {u - t? - _uselessc} 17:53, 10 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 05:18, 11 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Edit request 19 August 2025

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Description of suggested change: adjust the: |§ Reusers' rights and obligations

Diff:

waddie96 ★ (talk) 22:02, 19 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:57, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § Use more helpful CC image license tags

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § Use more helpful CC image license tags. —Matrix _{ping me}^{when u reply} (t? - c) 09:54, 4 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]