Thank you for the rewriting I don t see any problems with it and have as you ll no doubt notice put it in place Balancing Wikipedia s requirement that we rewrite from scratch with Wikipedia s requirement that we not deviate from our sources causes headaches for quite a few people and your question is raised so frequently that I kind of wonder if I should put something in our copyright FAQ about it It s a good question It s just not that easy to answer Frequently it can be at least partially addressed by the use of brief quotations from our sources when we can come up with good reasons for them Use of quotations must be transformative so we have to avoid the impulse to use something just because they said it well Very occasionally I will indulge in an as John Smith described it quote but most of the time our quotes should as per WP NFC illustrate a point establish context or attribute a point of view or idea When looking out for close paraphrasing I personally look for a combination of fragmented literal similarity and comprehensive non literal similarity if we see stretches of similar language in a work that overall follows the same structure of the original the risk of actionable close paraphrasing rises You balance that against the creativity of either structure is uncreative if anybody would have put the same details in the same order Language is uncreative if it is formulaic John Smith was born on 27 September 2010 in Paris France is uncreative The more language and details you stack though the more likely the content is to become creative The threshold for creativity in the U S which governs us is pretty low When writing I work to vary not only my language but also the organization of material U S courts have found copyright violation even when none of the language of the original is retained if the structure and pattern are similar And yes it sometimes feels like reaching behind your back to touch your elbow Keeping the information true to our sources without following them can be a challenge The more sources we find the better since we re far less likely to accidentally appropriate the structure of a source if we re weaving together facts from multiple sources Happy to discuss this further here or at a user talk page if you like and if you feel the conversation is done we can or archive this since it is no longer actively needed