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Help:Copying from Wikipedia

Contents

What should be copied

  • Everything relevant

Anything we might want to write here may have been written almost as well (or better than we could have) on WP and need only a little alteration - much easier than writing it all from scratch.

How to copy an article or part

Our technical people are working on a process similar to Transwiki, but that is not ready yet.

  • If a new article, then on any page of this wiki, create (or find a "dead" link and use) a link to the desired page name.
  • Go into edit mode on the Wikipedia article, copy everything in the edit box of the article (including all the templates (most of which work here or soon will) and categories (most of which are also categories here), and paste into this wiki. Delete the inter-language links (eg "[[fr:mademoiselle]]"), the only thing we can't use.
  • Add the acknowledgment template as below.

Add the template notice

Before the first save, for a simple permanent acknowledgment and reference, add the template {{wikipedia}}. Click "Show preview" to see how it all looks. The template should have produced something like this:

This article contains text from the Wikipedia article on City XYZ.

Further improvements

  • Edit the new or improved article, making it the best article possible. Edit Wikipedia links (e.g. Wikipedia:Article_name) when appropriate, so that they direct to the Wikipedia article if we don't have one of the same name and don't expect we ever will. Click Save page .
  • If you want to be really generous, copy and paste the the list of authors from the history page of the Wikipedian article to the talk page of the new one so contributors are properly credited.