User talk:Mahinat

Welcome!
Hello, Mahinat, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:36, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

Copyright
Hi! I have a quick note for you. I received a notification that you'd copied material from another source, posing a possible copyright or plagiarism issue. Looking over the material, this doesn't seem to be a plagiarism issue - rather just one of copyright. The issue here is that while this was created for a government organization, Hawaii does not put its work into the public domain and looks like it uses a fairly restrictive copyright overall. This means that we can't copy material from it unless we're copying it to use as a quote. Copyright is one of those things that is really, really weird and tricky.

Even with the Federal government there are some catches to the whole public domain content. For example, a contractor working for the government creates several documents. If they were a formal employee of the government those documents would be in the public domain. However since they're a contractor the copyright status of the documents would depend greatly on how their contract is written - sometimes it's written in a way that gives all rights to the government and sometimes it's not. That tricky nature of government work is why I tend to try to re-write stuff in my own words unless I'm very sure that it's in the public domain or under a compatible Creative Commons license.

I hope this helps! Don't worry if this all sounds odd - copyright is definitely something that doesn't always make a lot of easy sense. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:26, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

Ceded lands
Hi! I received a notification that some of the content you posted was taken from another source. It looks like this is pretty much a false positive, as one is a quote and the other is so specific that I don't really think that there are a lot of ways to rephrase the material, but just be careful about this and try to rephrase things in your own words whenever possible. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:51, 12 November 2019 (UTC)