Help:Adding open-license text to Wikipedia

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{{Wikipedia how-to|WP:COPYOPEN|WP:PDCOPY}}

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|Text on Wikipedia is added in one of two ways:

  1. Written by Wikipedia volunteers, using their own words to express the facts and ideas reported in the sources
  2. Copied from an external source whose copyright status is compatible with Wikipedia's license.

Open license text which is available under a compatible license or in the public domain can be used to improve existing Wikipedia articles and create new ones.

__NOTOC__

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Scope of this guide

This guide is about importing text that has been previously published with an open license, that is text previously unpublished in Wikimedia projects:

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Reminder: if you are being paid to add text to Wikipedia please state this and list the articles you've contributed to on your user page. For more information please see Wikipedia:Paid-contribution disclosure

Which licenses does Wikipedia accept?

=Accepted licenses=

Wikipedia accepts text available under these licenses. Acceptable licenses include:

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File:CC BY-SA icon.svg

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| CC BY-SA versions 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, and 4.0

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| CC BY, all versions and ports, up to, and including, 4.0

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| CC0

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| Work in the public domain is not "licensed" because it is not copyrighted. Wikipedia treats it similarly to CC0

=Licenses not accepted=

Among the licenses not acceptable for text in Wikipedia are:

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File:CC BY-SA icon.svg

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| CC BY-SA version 1.0{{efn|Text only. Images under this license are fine.}}

File:Cc-by-nd icon.svg

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|[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ Attribution-NoDerivatives]

File:Cc-by-nc icon.svg

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|[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Attribution-NonCommercial]

File:Cc-by-nc-sa icon.svg

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|[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike]

File:Cc-by-nc-nd icon.svg

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|[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives]

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|[https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.en.html GNU Free Documentation License] or any other GNU-only license

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| Text added to Wikipedia under an incompatible license is a copyright violation; if you find text under an incompatible license on Wikipedia please:

  1. Remove the text and attribution from the article, either by reverting to the version before it was inserted (being careful not to lose any other work on the article), or by deleting the text.
  2. Rewrite the text in your own words and avoid close paraphrasing, which may create a derivative work.

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Finding open license text to add to Wikipedia

There are many open access sources covering a wide range of subjects which are catalogued by the The Wikipedia Library including:

{{:Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/OANavboxcontents}}

There are also Wikiprojects working on the reuse of free content on Wikipedia and the adoption of Open Access:

Which sources work well?

The best open access text to add to Wikipedia include:

  • Literature reviews or surveys
  • Encyclopedic or tertiary source materials
  • Reports which survey or summarize known information about a topic or field

Try to avoid works which:

  • Are secondary sources, or sections within sources which focus on the author's analysis or conclusions.
  • Focuses on novel or unusual opinions about a topic; remember Wikipedia is about focusing on established, shared knowledge about topics.
  • Principally focus on persuasion or argumentation; thought sections of the work may appear neutral in tone, Wikimedia tries to include balance as well as neutrality and sources focused on persuasion frequently omit contrary perspectives.

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{{:Help:Adding open license text to Wikipedia/creating articles}}

{{:Help:Adding open license text to Wikipedia/how to}}

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Measuring reach

Tools are available to measure the number of page views Wikipedia articles receive that use text from a range of external sources e.g. a website, a section of a website, a specific URL or a publication:

====A small number of articles====

To measure the page views for a small number of Wikipedia pages where it is known text from a source has been used simply use the [https://pageviews.toolforge.org/ Pageviews tool] and enter the names of the articles into the Pages field (you can click on the x next to the name of an article to remove it from the graph).

====A larger number of articles====

To measure page views of all articles using text from a source use the Massviews Analysis Tool:

  1. [https://pageviews.toolforge.org/massviews/ Open the Massviews Analysis Tool].
  2. Chose the Dates you would like to measure.
  3. Change the Source to Search.
  4. Set the site to en.wikipedia.org.
  5. Depending on whether you want results from one source or multiple sources:
  6. One source: In the search field add hastemplate:"Free-content attribution" insource:"NAMEOFSOURCE" (including the quote marks), replacing NAMEOFSOURCE with the source you are searching for. E.g. if you would like to measure the page views of articles that reuse text from UNESCO enter hastemplate:"Free-content attribution" insource:"unesco.org" which will return [https://pageviews.toolforge.org/massviews/?platform=all-access&agent=user&source=search&target=hastemplate%3A%22Free-content_attribution%22_insource%3A%22unesco.org%22&start=2017-04-01&end=2017-04-30&project=en.wikipedia.org&sort=views&direction=1&view=list this result].
  7. Multiple sources: In the search field add hastemplate:"Free-content_attribution"_insource:/SOURCE1|SOURCE2|SOURCE3/ (including the quote marks), replacing SOURCE1, SOURCE2 and SOURCE3 with the sources you would like to search for. You may search for as many sources as you want, simply continue to separate each query with a | symbol. The only limitations are that the SOURCE cannot include a / symbol (searching for web addresses can be done by finding a unique part of the URL and searching for that) and the queries are limited to 300 characters. For example if you would like to measure the page views of articles that reuse text from a series of UNESCO PDFs (using only name of the PDF rather than the whole URL) enter hastemplate:"Free-content_attribution" insource:/244756e.pdf|232555e.pdf/ which will return [https://pageviews.toolforge.org/massviews/?platform=all-access&agent=user&source=search&target=hastemplate%3A%22Free-content_attribution%22_insource%3A%2F244756e.pdf%7C232555e.pdf%2F&start=2017-04-01&end=2017-04-30&project=en.wikipedia.org&sort=views&direction=1&view=list this result].
  8. Click Submit, to receive your results, you should receive a page that looks like [https://pageviews.toolforge.org/massviews/?platform=all-access&agent=user&source=search&target=hastemplate%3A%22Free-content_attribution%22_insource%3A%22unesco.org%22&start=2017-02-28&end=2017-03-29&project=en.wikipedia.org&sort=views&direction=1&view=list this example showing text used on English languages Wikipedia from UNESCO].
  9. The data can be viewed as either a list or a chart and can be downloaded as either a csv or json file, you can also create a permalink (permanent link) to easily access the results again. If you want to set up a URL to a query that will always return results for the past 30 days, simply select last month in the date selection options.

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Share your content on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in the world and [https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/reportcard/#pageviews-july-2015-now receives over 15 billion page views per month]. If you would like to make text or any other content available on Wikipedia you can learn how to license and label your work (website, publication etc.) on the Creative Commons website [https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/ here], the licenses Wikipedia accepts are listed above.

To help people learn about text you have made available under an open license, you can contact [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Directory a Wikiproject that works on that subject] or your [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters local Wikimedia organisation]. They will help to get it reused. If you have a specific article in mind that could use the text you can write on the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Using_talk_pages article talk page]. To contact a Wikiproject or writing on an article talk page:

  1. [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CreateAccount&returnto=Wikipedia%3AWhy+create+an+account%3F Create an account]
  2. Select the relevant article. Click on a talk page. (located at the top of any Wikipedia article)
  3. Click New Section
  4. Write a message to give details about the text, then provide a link to the web address where it may be found.

Tools are available to measure reuse and reach of your content and are described above.

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Notes