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

[Peachesbackwards]

Are you allowed under Wikipedia's policy to take any information from their site, not change the words and make it a complete blog under their free use act? If not, please clarify.

[swillard8]

yep, cause they are not written by wikipedia, but by millions of people around the world.

[Nathan]

You have to put credit back to Wikipedia though.

[trailofpen]

Yes. Wikipedia is covered the by the GNU Free Documentation License, which means anyone can reproduce and redistribute anything on wikipedia free of charge.

[trailofpen]

I would also like to add that, technically, you don't have to credit wikipedia because all content on wikipedia is property of the authors of the content and not wikipedia itself. Therefore, if you really want to be safe, you would have to credit every single contributor to the article, which you can find by clicking the "history" tab on any wikipedia article.

[Monkeyman09]

I read something recently about Wikipedia trying to keep people from using the content on their website. Like they were holding it for patenting reasons. I can't remember exactly what or why it happened, people got pretty mad at them. Sorry there's no link, I tried looking for it. Here's just a heads up if you want to search yourself.

[flashgordon]

I wouldn't do this. There was a guy on another forum that just got banned from Adsense for posting reworked Wikipedia articles on his blog. They said it was not "useful" information and canceled his account.

[QuirkyJessi]

Even if it's legal, I don't see it appropriate to copy/paste *entire* Wikipedia articles at all. I can understand copying certain selections or linking people to more information on Wikipedia, but otherwise, there's no good reason. Just sounds like trying to make money off other people's efforts.

[Maya]

It is a sticky question. You are better off taking sections from Wikipedia rather than whole articles, this will also help avoid duplicate content penalties.

[CommonForte]

I would borrow some stuff...but why not write on your own and improve your skills??