Help:Copying from other wikis

Copying from Wikipedia or another wiki hosted by Fandom/Wikia is allowed under what's known as the CC BY-NC License. There's more to it, but the gist is that you can copy from them as long as you say at the time that you did.

It would be better if you don't copy from other wikis, especially if you were planning on just copying the entire page to add here, but if you do, you have to do the following:


 * 1) Don't highlight the page and copy it from there. Edit the page, then copy the code from inside the editing window.
 * 2) Put a note in the "Edit summary" box where you got it from, such as "copied from the Villains Wikia" or "copied from Wikipedia".

The reason for the first step is that a lot of web browsers pick up all the behind-the-scenes formatting such as the size of the text and what color the letters are displayed in. It also picks up what are called "hard links", which are the full Internet addresses back to the wiki you got them from.

All of these cause the page to be a lot larger than it needs to be and makes editing it more difficult. In cases where the text color is picked up, it can be hard to read, such as the rest this sentence which is in a 7 point font size that is almost unreadable.

Occasionally copying directly from another wiki is okay, but that should not be the only way you create information here. It's a lot like book reports in school. You can copy a little as long as you give credit to where you copied it from, but if all you did was take masking tape and covered an author's name on a book so you could write your own in it and handed that it, it would be plagiarism.

A better way is to take another cue from those book reports: come up with your own research and/or rewrite information so that it's worded differently but conveys the same idea. If you do the latter, it still helps to note that in the Edit summary, such as "based on information from the Disney Wikia".