Wikipedia Are You Allowed to Copy Complete Articles & Put in Blog Posts

[Nathan]

One thing is for sure: if you just copy content from Wikipedia for you blog you will not get very good rankings on your blog.

It is a well-known fact that Google penalizes sites that have duplicate content, and if your blog is just copied from Wikipedia it won't be very high ranking.

In addition, why would people visit your blog just to view articles taken from Wikipedia rather than going to Wikipedia itself?

In my opinion, if you are going to blog, then do it right--take the time to write your own decent articles that will attract visitors in their own right. That is what blogging is about.

[Peachesbackwards]

Thanks for your info which was very helpful and I won't pursue the idea of copying complete articles or even using a section if its not necessary. I've probably quoted Wikepedia on maybe 3 paragraphs total in all my blogs and from what your saying its not worth expanding on using them more,

The one thing I can tell you guys right off the spot though is, and here is where a lot of you make mistakes and it costs you a lot of traffic nothing personal is, the right title as well as the right tags will get you traffic where the "same article" found elsewhere under an obscure title and bad tags won't, so you're wrong about why people wouldn't read the same info found somewhere else. Because they can't find it somewhere else. Here is a hypothetical example: Octomom. Let's say you read hypothetically that she was a Stripper. If you just used a clear straightforward title, "Octomom Stripper" with the right key words, there is no doubt, you would get more traffic than titles like "Octomom Secret job", etc.

Anyway, thanks for the info on Wikipedia.

[Monkeyman09]

I don't think it's wrong to be able to quote a snippet or two. Maybe a sentence, up to a paragraph and that's it. As long as you quote and linkback to Wikipedia, giving full credit.

[Ferox]

Borrow a paragraph or two, but credit it with the url and the date becasue wiki changes all the time. Why you'd want to take whole sections is beyond me.

[InfoHelper]

I agree that it's fine to use some content from Wiki, but at least add some original thought so that someone reading your blog learns something other than what they would on Wiki itself.