LOTR tag wiki has a long write-up that ends with "From: The Lord Of The Rings on wikipedia". I didn't check whether it was fully copy/paste as the sentence seems to imply, but in general; is simply copying a long couple of paragraphs from Wikipedia OK for tag wiki texts assuming it's attributed?
asked Jun 14, 2012 at 8:59
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1 Answer
First, if it's not attributed, it's illegal. This goes for the excerpt too, which does not have room for an attribution.
When it's attributed, it's legal, and there is no outright policy against it, but it is often not a good idea. Wikipedia is a generalist encyclopedia, whereas our tag wikis should contain information that's relevant to our community of SF consumers. For lord-of-the-rings, it's not catastrophic, but it's not very good either. For authors, this tends to be worse: we care about what they've produced, Wikipedia copy-paste tends to produce irrelevant biographical details.
We have a previous general discussion of what should be in a tag wiki.
See also a similar question on the main meta, and my opinion on the practice (in a word: no).
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Please clarify: "Not a good idea" as in "policy says you shouldn't do it", or "experience teaches that - even though it's not against policy - in practice the result is usually poor quality tag Wiki". Sounds like the latter, bot not 100% clearly so. Commented Jun 14, 2012 at 9:25
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@DVK the latter. (“it's legal, but often not a good idea”)– user56Commented Jun 14, 2012 at 9:32
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@Gilles If the excerpt is not attributed, but by definition is supposed to be an 'excerpt' of the tag wiki, isn't attributing it in the wiki enough? Commented Mar 10, 2013 at 3:14