Forum:Copying great chunks of wikipedia

Should we allow/promote the copying of large chunks from wikipedia (such as the plots of various new series stories) or should we be aiming for a unique and different style from wikipedia? --Tangerineduel 16:00, 17 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I think a bit of both/in the middle. Take the plots and modify them, or something like that. 16:40, 17 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I think the only real changes should be to put the proper links. I don't think the styles are really much different here than on Wikipedia. Azes13


 * I just found reading them that they're more a blow by blow (and pretty wordy at that) description of what happens rather than a detailed summary. --Tangerineduel 03:02, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Archivist's notes
We've moved on a bit from the position seemingly espoused here. We don't outright ban copying text from Wikipedia, but we do very much discourage it nowadays. Ghelæ and Azes13's responses are particularly far from what we're currently attempting to do. I think it's probably fair to say that we have used Wikipedia text as a kind of "placeholder" until we wrote our own summaries. Even that, though, is quite unusual now. Most editors today are, judging by actual practice, starting with barebones articles rather than placeholding with a big block of text from wikipedia. 14:49:41 Wed 01 Jun 2011