OrthodoxWiki:Style Manual (Importing)
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Importing Articles from Wikipedia
It is permitted (and even encouraged) to import relevant articles from Wikipedia. However, when doing so, keep a few things in mind. First, all material from Wikipedia is not necessarily public domain. Most of it is probably released in several different forms of limited license, usually entailing that the material may be freely distributed so long as no monetary profit is made from it. The key thing is to look closely at the notes on the article. This especially applies to images being imported.
All articles imported from Wikipedia should contain a link back to the original article, preferrably a version permalink (this can be obtained by right clicking on the topmost date in the "history" tab). Please see OrthodoxWiki:Copyrights for more information.
It is also important to strip out irrelevant links. Leave only links that are relevant to OrthodoxWiki. Things to strip out include year links (even for an historically oriented church like ours, there's probably not going to be enough of historic significance in the Church going on in a single year to warrant a whole article about it), city names, and so on. Place name links should be left in only if, for instance, they are the name of a place which is almost exclusively of religious significance (e.g., Iona). We don't need an article for Constantinople, however, mainly because anything specifically religiously relevant to the city is likely to be covered in other articles.
Things to leave in that might not otherwise be obvious: leave in dates (e.g., November 13), historic persons who have had an impact on the Church (even if not members, e.g., Arius or Julian the Apostate), events along those same lines (e.g., the Fall of Constantinople), and so on.
Also be sure to do searches on OrthodoxWiki to examine existing articles so that internal links might be made in a consistent way—for instance, use First Ecumenical Council (the established OrthodoxWiki way) instead of First Council of Nicaea (the established Wikipedia way).
Additionally, "Orthodoxize" the articles. Things which to secular scholars might appear to be biased might simply be a statement of truth for the Orthodox (e.g., "The Orthodox Church is the sole Church founded by Jesus Christ"). That doesn't mean that anything negative about the Church's members should be glossed over, but be sure to keep in mind that OrthodoxWiki is an Orthodox Christian website, and so things here are written and edited from that point of view.
Importing Images from other sources
Please refer to Help:Image licenses for important information about using images from other sources on OrthodoxWiki.
Respect Copyrights
Material contributed to OrthodoxWiki must either be original work by the contributor, who releases it by default under dual license arrangement noted above, or it must be released to OrthodoxWiki by explicit permission of the copyright holder, in which case it can be included under a license determined by the owner. (You can browse OrthodoxWiki's selection of Copyright Templates or create your own.)
To determine if use of outside material legally qualifies as Fair use under U.S. law, consult Wikipedia:Fair use. Generally speaking, copyrighted material may be quoted if it is part of a larger work which cites the material and makes use of it for the purposes of comment on it.
Violations of copyright law on OrthodoxWiki are not tolerated. All material is the responsibility of the contributors to the site, so while the administration does the best it can to prevent violation of copyright law, some material may have slipped their notice. (See: OrthodoxWiki:Disclaimer.) If you own a copyright that is being violated on OrthodoxWiki, contact the administration immediately so that the problem may be resolved.
Starting Points
Good places to begin looking for information include:
