User talk:Nickn99

Welcome!
Hello, Nickn99, 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) 15:24, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

Creative Commons licenses
Hi Nick, I received a note that you had plagiarized content from another source, specifically from this website. While the website does license its work under a Creative Commons license, there are some issues in reusing the content.

The first is that the license the site uses makes certain requirements, one of which is that any reuse must be properly attributed to them. The second is that the material is not neutrally written. Words like "remarkable" are seen as opinion words and are inherently non-neutral. Articles should not use these words unless they're specifically used in a quote or statement attributed to a particular person or organization, such as an organization stating that someone is remarkable or a person writing a review, where they call a book remarkable. The article itself should never use these words, as it makes it biased - even if many people would agree with the statements. In most cases material taken from elsewhere would still need to be re-written, since most other outlets don't have to remain neutral or use the type of writing style that Wikipedia prefers.

The third and most important issue is that this particular Creative Commons license doesn't allow for commercial re-use, which makes it incompatible with Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a bit picky with what it can use - the license has to be one where users can adapt and share the material, even if they use it for commercial purposes. This means that what Creative Commons licenses can be used are fairly particular. This page goes over copyright as it applies to images, which is fairly similar to how copyright is seen on Wikipedia - one thing to notice is how few of the Creative Commons licenses are seen as usable.

Ultimately using the text in the way you did, taking the material verbatim without indication that it was someone else's words is seen as plagiarism and a copyright issue. Any time you use someone else's words you must attribute them to that person - however I must stress that in most situations you cannot use their work in an article unless it's a small quote, which should only be used sparingly. I would like for you to re-take the training module on plagiarism before progressing further, thanks. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:45, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Nick, please do not reuse any material from Open Democracy. As stated above, the material cannot be reused on Wikipedia because it poses a copyright issue due to their license not being compatible with Wikipedia. Continuing to repost the material after being warned can be seen as disruptive and can lead to an admin blocking you for ignoring copyright warnings. I'm also going to have to let your professor know that you have reposted the content after receiving a warning. Wikipedia has a zero tolerance policy for copyrighted material getting reposted to the site, so I can't stress how important it is to pay attention to what I've written. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:17, 3 April 2018 (UTC)