User talk:Akgravgaard

Welcome!

Hello, Akgravgaard, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place  before the question. Again, welcome! Vsmith (talk) 15:28, 4 October 2011 (UTC)
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Please read Wikipedias copyright policy as several of your recent additions have been copied from other sources. Vsmith (talk) 15:28, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

How to donate content to Wikipedia
Hi. Vsmith asked me to speak to you about copyright issues on Wikipedia. It seems that you may have been contributing material to articles that you might have previously published elsewhere. For instance, your edit to the article on Colombia included content from this article on Earth Island Journal.

Generally, you will own the copyright to your previously published work and have every right to submit here under our license, but because of the legal issues, there is some "red tape" we have to go through.

First, because we have no means of verifying your identity when you created your account, we would need you to verify that you are actually the author of that content. This is usually accomplished via an e-mail to the Wikimedia Foundation. This can be kind of difficult if you do not have an official website, because we have to have some way of verifying that we aren't facilitating fraud against you. We need to be able to be sure that the person writing us is who they say they are, and that's hard when there is no known address to compare to. There are ways around it, though; for instance, perhaps you could ask for an edit to your bio at the Pulitzer Center to provide contact information (even temporarily) or to verify that you edit Wikipedia under this account. If you want to temporarily provide contact information let me know, and we can arrange for you to send in an email as soon as possible so that you need keep it up no longer than necessary. (I am one of the people with access to that confidential email system, so I can help make sure that this is handled quickly.)

The second issue we face is that sometimes authors must release their copyright or provide a license to their publishers which may not permit them to reuse their own content here. We ran into this situation several years ago, when an historian put a large amount of content from his books on Wikipedia which his publisher did not permit. We had to take down almost every article he had ever written. :/ I would ask that you please make sure, once we have verified your identity, that any content you add is from publications that permit you to license it here as well. Please remember that the licenses we require permit both commercial use and modification, retaining only the right to attribution. (You can read a bit more about this at Donating copyrighted materials.)

Alternatively, of course, you are more than welcome to use new language to add content to Wikipedia, as this will sidestep the red tape completely. In that case, you'd just want to think of it as though your sources had been written by somebody else and you were citing them in a new research paper, being careful to avoid Plagiarism. We are happy to have people edit in fields in which they are expert, although we do recommend that you review WP:SELFCITE to avoid running into any complications. Wikipedia has unfortunately been misused for self-promotion to the point that many members in our community are a bit paranoid about it. :/ Best to avoid the question if possible.

Sorry for the complications here, but, again, because this is a legal matter we do have some procedures we have to follow. It's all in the interest of keeping our encyclopedia free for everyone, everywhere, around the world. :) If you'd like to go through the process of verifying your identity, please feel free to let me know, and I can help you explore options for that. Alternatively, you can write to  to speak directly to one of the many other volunteers who man that mail system. Linking them to this conversation might help, since this is not an everyday situation. :) --Moonriddengirl (talk) 09:55, 13 October 2011 (UTC)