Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks: Difference between revisions

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Things you need to know

Using these mirrors and forks on Wikipedia: Copies of Wikipedia are not reliable sources and not acceptable external links in articles per the verifiability policy. Articles that use a republished work as a source should be edited to either remove the work or to tag the source with {{Circular-ref}}. Leave {{backwardscopy}} on the article's talk page to identify Wikipedia as the original source.
Copyright status of mirrors and forks: Every contribution to the English Wikipedia has been licensed for re-use, including commercial, for-profit websites. Republication is not necessarily a breach of copyright, so long as the appropriate licenses are complied with.
Effect of non-compliance with licenses: If the license is not complied with, then the republication is a copyright violation. You own the copyright to your contributions, not the Wikimedia Foundation. Legally, the Wikimedia Foundation is in the same position as the republishers (except that the WMF always complies with your license terms), because the WMF is republishing your copyrighted content under your license. If someone violates the terms of the license, then enforcement needs to come from the copyright owner. Consequently, complaints about violations need to be made by a person who actually wrote part of the improperly republished material. See #Non-compliance process for one typical method for dealing with publishers who violate your copyright. If your own copyright has not been violated, then you may contact one or more of the editors who own the copyright for the material in question, and suggest that they follow the steps in the suggested process. The Wikimedia Foundation and the community cannot do this on behalf of the copyright owner.

Non-compliance process

This section describes the steps that might be taken on discovering a new site that uses Wikipedia content without properly complying with the license.

Note that Wikipedia does not give legal advice. Contributors retain their own copyright for submitted work.

If you do contact a website about infringement relating to work originally submitted to Wikipedia, please note it on the relevant subpage listed above. Doing this will help coordinate activities in helping other websites become compliant with our licence, without webmasters feeling harassed by lots of angry non-compliance notices.

You may want to consider using a disposable e-mail address for this: since many of the websites listed here are built for advertising purposes, spamming is a possibility. Also, if the owner is planning to shut down the webpage, or remove the Wikipedia content as a whole, suggest to them that they use robots.txt or meta tags so we can remove and prevent future search engine indexing and caching for those websites. Also, if the owner is reachable, suggest that they update their Wiki with the latest database dumps to keep up with recent changes.

Steps

This is not an official guideline but a tool you can use for dealing with infringement. Continue the series below as long as the site is non-compliant. Note that you must choose only pages for which you hold (partial) copyright. These steps only work for dealing with infringement on websites in the United States.

If the text is licensed under CC-BY-SA only, send a standard CC-BY-SA violation letter to the site owner. If it is dually licensed, send a standard license violation letter. You can use a whois lookup to get contact info if it is not otherwise available.
One week (or more) later, send a follow-up reminder.
Three weeks (or more) later, send a final warning, noting that continued infringement will result in a DMCA takedown notice being sent to their ISP.
Two weeks (or more) later, send a DMCA takedown notice to the ISP, enumerating articles that infringe your copyright. Note separately that the site also violates the copyrights of others. To find the appropriate address, first search the ISP's website. To find the ISP, you can: enter the domain name in the DNS search at http://dnsstuff.com, then click the IP. First search the ISP's site for a legal address. If that doesn't work, try to look them up at http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/list/ . If they're not in the directory, send the notice to the abuse address. Note that sites are not legally required to accept DMCA notices. If they don't the only recourse is legal action.

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 #Three weeks (or more) later, send a final warning, noting that continued infringement will result in a DMCA takedown notice being sent to their ISP.
 #Two weeks (or more) later, send a [[Wikipedia:Standard GFDL violation letter#DMCA takedown notice|DMCA takedown notice]] to the ISP, enumerating articles that infringe '''''your''''' copyright.  Note separately that the site also violates the copyrights of others.  To find the appropriate address, first search the ISP's website.  To find the ISP, you can: enter the domain name in the DNS search at http://dnsstuff.com, then click the IP.  First search the ISP's site for a legal address.  If that doesn't work, try to look them up at http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/list/ .  If they're not in the directory, send the notice to the abuse address.  Note that sites are not legally required to accept DMCA notices.  If they don't the only recourse is legal action.
-==Copies of ''this'' list==
-A separate list of sites that utilise Wikipedia content is maintained at the [[WP:OpenFacts|OpenFacts]] site: <span class="plainlinks">[https://web.archive.org/web/20081015170146/http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=Copies_of_Wikipedia_content Copies of Wikipedia content]</span>. This list consists primarily of complete copies of all Wikipedia articles. It is intended to show readers where they can get Wikipedia content when Wikipedia itself is down.
 == See also ==