Help:Use content from Wikipedia

Overview: It is legal to copy and edit content from Wikipedia articles because Wikipedia text is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, as is all material on Catholic Commons. Photographs in Wikipedia are licensed under a variety of licenses and thus you should read the 'Wikipedia photos' section below to see whether a given photo can be used on this site.

Wikipedia text: In the case of Wikipedia and other GFDL or Creative Commons licensed text, you can copy and modify content from those sites as long as the text remains under the original license and you indicate the source and authors. Since all of the text on Catholic Commons is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-by-SA 3.0), the licensing is not an issue. To indicate the source and authors, add a one line template statement at the end of the article in the form of {{wikipedia|''article name''}} where article_name is the Wikipedia article name. To be sure the link is working, preview the article and template text and click through to Wikipedia in the attribution box to be sure the link is correct.

Mechanics of copying Wikipedia content: The easiest way to use content from Wikipedia is to copy it by highlighting it on the main article page (that is, DO NOT EDIT the page), copying it, pasting it, and then recreating any headings (using ==Heading==, etc.). If you do edit the Wikipedia article and then copy the source code for the article, you will have to do a lot of editing to clean it up. All of the Wikipedia internal links (things inside brackets like this [[]]) will be broken links since those articles probably do not yet exist in Catholic Commons. Also, all of the links to Wikipedia templates (inside curly brackets like this {{}}), all of the image (photo) references, and any footnotes or references will not work unless you copy over the templates and images. It is OK to change the article name from Wikipedia to Catholic Commons.

Wikipedia photos: In contrast to text, Wikipedia does not license images (e.g., photographs) under the CC-by-SA 3.0 license but rather allows users to choose a license they want to use. It is only possible to reuse Wikipedia images if the user chooses a license that allows reuse on other sites (e.g., GFDL and Creative Commons licenses, public domain images). If reuse is allowed, you must download the photo to your computer and then upload it to Catholic Commons. When filling in the boxes for the file upload menu, enter the same copyright terms as were specified in Wikipedia and give the URL for the photo in Wikipedia in the "Source" box. You may or may not be able to make modifications to the image (e.g., cropping it, adding a text label) depending on the license. Licenses that allow such derivative works include GFDL and some of the Creative Commons licenses.

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