Difference between revisions of "SVR Wiki:Copyrights"

Revision as of 09:35, 13 January 2015

In general, there are two cases where we need to consider copyright and sourcing - firstly in copying text from someone else, and secondly in the use of images, photographs, and so on.

Text

In general, you should avoid copying text verbatim from another source - very often it makes for a fairly low quality article, as the text will be out of context and probably in the wrong style. Instead, it's far better to re-write these in your own words (preferably bringing things together from several sources), and then referencing where you got the information from - a link to a web page, or perhaps a short note identifying a book or magazine. If you do need to copy text, you should make clear that it is a quote (e.g. by making it italic and enclosing it in speech marks), and again, say where it came from.

Images and Photographs

Most of the images you find on the internet, whilst freely viewable, are still owned by their author. As a result, we are not able to copy their image onto this website without their permission. There are two possible solutions to this - firstly, you can simply ask the author whether they would be happy for us to copy it onto this site! Many people are quite willing to let you do this, provided that you provide some credit to them (which can be done on the file information page); they might even be tempted to start contributing to the Wiki, using more of their photo collection. Failing that, you can provide a link to the page with the image on - e.g. a flickr page, or someone's personal photo website. This means the photo is still under their control, but it still allows readers of this site to view the image; if the image is freely viewable online, there is nothing to stop you telling people where to find it.