Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials

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Shortcut: WP:DCP

Often, people wish to "donate" copyrighted materials to Wikipedia. These materials may be text (including monographs, articles, etc.) or images (including photographs). They may or may not already be posted on some other web site. 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 the public domain, but the focus is on copyrighted materials, because they raise more complicated issues.)

1 What it means to donate material to Wikipedia
2 Why we cannot take certain donations
3 Donating your photographs
4 Granting us permission to copy material already online
5 Related pages

What it means to donate material to Wikipedia

When you contribute material to Wikipedia, you are not giving us exclusive use of it. You still retain any rights you previously held, but you are giving non-exclusive license under GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Note that there is no way to say "you can use this 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 education use or even for general non-commercial use.

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 license requires us to provide that credit, and to ensure that you are not held liable in any sense for the changes others make to your work. Do remember 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 GFDL.

If it is important for some reason that your work remain intact, please read the guidelines for our sister project, Wikisource.

Why we cannot take certain donations

You cannot donate what someone else owns

If you are not the copyright holder of the material you cannot donate rights to Wikipedia! The last thing we want are copyright 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:

Most web pages do not allow their material to be freely copied. Unless the material either is public domain, carries a copyleft notice compatible with GFDL, or you have explicit permission to use it, please don't copy and paste from other web sites into Wikipedia. (Wikipedia:Requesting copyright permission provides information on obtaining and verifying explicit permission.)
If you are the original author but the rights have been assigned to your publisher, you have given up the ability to license the work to us.

Wikipedia is not a universal compendium

Wikipedia is not a universal compendium. There are things we include and things we don't. Probably the best explanation of this is "Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not". In particular, we try not to include content that is below an encyclopedic level of notability. We probably don't need an article about your college club (unless it happens to be something like the Oxford Union). On the other hand, we are open to encyclopedic articles, with cited sources and written from a neutral 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. See Wikipedia:Museum projects for some related thoughts.

Wikipedia does not publish original research

Wikipedia is not a primary source, which publishes new or untested research; our position is described at "Wikipedia:No original research". If your work is theoretical, cutting-edge, unpublished, or otherwise unverifiable through other sources, you will need to seek other avenues to publish it first.

Donating your photographs

See also: Commons:Welcome

If you have taken photographs that you think would be useful to Wikipedia, you can scan them and upload them to Wikimedia Commons (you will need to create an account to do this), where they can be used by any Wikimedia project, including Wikipedia. Please, if you are uploading images, become familiar with the image copyright tags. If they are your own photos, you will probably want to use one of the following:

{{GFDL-self}} to retain copyright, but license the image under the GNU Free Documentation License.
{{PD-self}} to release your image into the public domain.
{{CC-BY-3.0}} or {{CC-BY-SA-3.0}} to license your image under the Creative Commons License (note, not all CC licenses are accepted here). Contributions may also be dual-licensed under the GFDL and the CC.
{{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."

We encourage you to place a descriptive caption and source information (such as when and how it was taken) onto the Image description page in addition to the image copyright tag.

Granting us permission to copy material already online

One simple way to grant permission to copy material already on line 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 the GFDL, a GFDL-compatible license such as a Creative Commons license, or are in the public domain.

If you would like to allow Wikipedia to use your content, but don't want to put a license statement on the site (note that you still must release it under a free license), you can contact permissions-en@wikimedia.org for text for an article on the English Wikipedia, or another English Wikimedia site. For images, contact permissions-commons@wikimedia.org. See here for an example permissions granting email. For text, after sending the email, you may put the text into the article, then place {{OTRS pending}} on the article's discussion page. For images, upload the file to Wikimedia Commons and place {{OTRS pending}} on the image page. Someone will reply to your email, indicating whether the content and your license is acceptable and update the page to indicate that the confirmation of the license has been received.

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: