This is not the page to report a specific article's copyright problem. To do so, list the article on today's entry at the project page after following the appropriate instructions.
– I have found 48 articles created more than 20 years ago that each contain content that exactly matches a website that was created a couple years later (see User:Donald Albury/Desk articles). The website content may have originally been in a printed catalog before being uploaded. If the content in the WP articles is copyvio, it will mean revdeling 20+ years of later edits. I figured I needed a sanity check on this. Donald Albury21:04, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
How much can an article match a public domain source?[edit]
I came across the article Autobiographic Sketches tonight, and noticed that the language seemed a bit unusual/formal ("reminiscent articles"), which made me suspect potential machine translation or copyright violation.
The sole reference on the article is the entry on the book from the 1920 Encyclopedia Americana, which is in the public domain. If you look at the entry in wikisource (linked from the article), you can see that large chunks of it are repeated verbatim in the article (and have been since the very first version of the article). I am aware that we can "incorporate text" from a public domain source, but I hadn't seen an article before that hews so closely to the source. It seems like this is probably okay with the acknowledgement, but I do not have much experience with the public domain, so I figured I'd check here to see if this is okay or if the content needs to be changed.
@CleancutkidPretty much as much as you like, as long as its attributed! In the early days of Wikipedia, it was really common for people to create articles by copying from old, out of copyright editions of various encyclopedias. This has fallen out of fashion as of late, since a lot of public domain text isn't suitable for inclusion to Wikipedia on non-copyright grounds. (Typically it presents original research in Wikivoice, doesn't maintain neutrality, or is simply too outdated to be of any use. If dealing with a non-European/American topic, sometimes they're overtly racist). But if something is public domain, that means it cannot be protected by copyright laws anymore and can freely be uploaded to Wikisource, Commons, or even Wikipedia. I hope that's an okay answer? GreenLipstickLesbian (talk) 07:00, 7 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I still do this frequently. I write a lot of articles about 19th-century judicial figures, and there are often contemporaneous public domain biographies of these persons that contain material that requires only a little language tweaking to fit into our modern encyclopedia. Our purpose here is to provide information to our readers, not to engage in an academic exercise in original thinking. BD2412T14:49, 7 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello! I'm working on Gwoyeu Romatzyh, and a source I'm working from already has just what I felt I needed to add: a very basic table listing a handful of words and how they appear when written using different systems. I know information itself is not copyrightable, and there's not a lot of "work" here other than picking representative examples (the table uses 3 × 4 = 12 examples total), but I still figured I'd ask whether it's alright to use the same examples adapted to a table in the article? Cited, it goes without saying. Remsense诉02:46, 9 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Resolved
