wikipedia and copyright hello jbeck and welcome to wikipedia your addition to derby has had to be removed as it appears to have added copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder while we appreciate your contributing to wikipedia there are certain things you must keep in mind about using information from your sources to avoid copyright or plagiarism issues here you can only copy translate a small amount of a source and you must mark what you take as a direct quotation with double quotation marks and a cited source you can read about this at wikipedia non free content in the sections on text see also help referencing for beginners for how to cite sources here aside from limited quotation you must put all information in your own words and structure in proper paraphrase following the source's words too closely can create copyright problems so it is not permitted here see wikipedia close paraphrasing there is a college level introduction to paraphrase with examples hosted by the online writing lab of purdue even when using your own words you are still however asked to cite your sources to verify information and to demonstrate that the content is not original research our primary policy on using copyrighted content is wikipedia copyrights you may also want to review wikipedia copy paste if you own the copyright to the source you want to copy or are a designated agent you may be able to license that text so that we can publish it here however there are steps that must be taken to verify that license before you do see wikipedia donating copyrighted materials in very rare cases that is for sources that are public domain or compatibly licensed it may be possible to include greater portions of a source text however please seek help at the help desk before adding such content to the article of sources may not be added in this way so it is necessary to seek confirmation first if you do confirm that a source is public domain or compatibly licensed you will still need to provide full attribution see wikipedia plagiarism for the steps you need to follow also note that wikipedia articles may not be copied or translated without attribution if you want to copy or translate from another wikipedia project or article you can but please follow the steps in wikipedia copying within wikipedia it's very important that contributors understand and follow these practices as policy requires that people who persistently do not must be blocked from editing if you have any questions about this you are welcome to leave me a message on my talk page the use of copyrighted images with no fair use rationale is prohibited see wikipedia non free use rationale guideline thanks thank you