PathfinderWiki talk:Plagiarism
Copying and pasting from the Paizo blog
I understand your Plagiarism policy, but my question is this.
According to the Paizo Publishing, LLC Community Use Policy, you are allowed to use the text or artwork published in the Paizo Blog. Much of the blog is a very good description of places, people, events, etc., Is it against your plagiarism policy to use word for word text from the Paizo blog? Dragnmoon 10:11, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
- Many of the early articles are directly from the blog, and we haven't really discussed this one way or the other. once we obtain the actual books the blog is written from we usually try to go back and edit the direct blog articles, as 1) some of the blogs are written before final editing is done, and some things might change. and 2)Its confusing enough to some people that they can't copy right out of the book, they would never understand that they can copy righto out of the blog. - Cpt kirstov 11:55, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
- As the good captain says, it is a confusing spot. To date we have copy/pasted directly from the blog quite often. When this info is comprises an entire article, I usually try to change a little bit here or there to make it less a direct c/p, but legally it's not necessary. If it's part of a larger article, I usually try to divide the quote up into the subsections where its components belong. I think we could clarify the plagiarism policy to include permission to copy/paste directly from the blog given Paizo's granting of such, but we would need to stipulate that correct citation of that blog entry would be a necessity. Also, welcome to the Wiki! -- yoda8myhead 15:51, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
- Nearly all iconic articles consist of their Meet the Iconics text copied and pasted from the Paizo blog, which remains a known exception not documented in the policy in 2025. -Oznogon (talk) 19:47, 4 April 2025 (UTC)
- As the member of the Paizo staff who made that exception, I should clarify that the intent was to allow the earlier Meet the Iconics backstories, which are far more encyclopedic in nature than more recent ones that include dialogue and other narrative elements, making them far more "fiction" than blog. I don't think the wiki *has* to remove copy/pasted blog content due to restrictions of the policy or because it's "plagiarism," but I do think it may be a best practice for us to work toward. —
Yoda8myhead (talk) 19:55, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
- As the member of the Paizo staff who made that exception, I should clarify that the intent was to allow the earlier Meet the Iconics backstories, which are far more encyclopedic in nature than more recent ones that include dialogue and other narrative elements, making them far more "fiction" than blog. I don't think the wiki *has* to remove copy/pasted blog content due to restrictions of the policy or because it's "plagiarism," but I do think it may be a best practice for us to work toward. —
- Collected articles that were easily identifiable as containing copied and pasted blog posts in Category:Articles copied from the Paizo blog, a hidden maintenance category. Notable beyond the Meet the Iconics stories are the fiction paragraphs from No-Prep Character series, all of which are copied from the blog posts, and Taxfest and Seven Veils, which are largely copied from the blog with some edits to accommodate newer sources. This list is likely not comprehensive. -Oznogon (talk) 00:45, 7 April 2025 (UTC)
Quotes from in-universe characters
How should one avoid plagiarism when using quote from an in-universe character? I.e. I'd love to include a quote from Seeker of Secrets in the Pathfinder article: "To be a Pathfinder is to give up all sense of home, to marry yourself to the road and let your words be your children..." —Pathfinder Jaroven Kesk
Is that allowable? Should the content of the quote be re-phrased as regular article content? "Some pathfinders say that to be a pathfinder means to marry the road..." Should only part of the quote be used? --Capt pantsless 15:08, April 16, 2010 (UTC)
- There is {{Quote}}, which you can use to quote short sections of in-world-attributable text to an article. As long as we're not doing so for every bit of in-character flavor text in every book, I don't see it as a problem. We're likely to have memorable quotes once the fiction line kicks off, as well, so no point avoiding it. I'd keep quotes at the top of articles for layout reasons, though. —yoda8myhead 15:59, April 16, 2010 (UTC)
Template
Added {{Plagiarism}} as an option to flag an article for violations of this policy and to categorize flagged articles into Category:PathfinderWiki maintenance for administrative attention. -Oznogon (talk) 00:56, 15 October 2019 (UTC)