PathfinderWiki:Plagiarism
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This page is an official policy on the PathfinderWiki. In accordance with policy, this page has been protected. You can suggest changes by following the revision procedure or discussing it on the talk page. |
PathfinderWiki is not an online version of the source material, so you must not include wording directly from the source material unless it is a short quote that could not be adequately represented otherwise. See PathfinderWiki:Scope of the project for more information about the goals of the wiki and therefore what kind of material it is acceptable to use. Although not directly related, you should avoid including "crunchy" details. "Crunch" is an informal term used to refer to material relating to statistics and rules. See PathfinderWiki:No crunch for more information.
Avoiding plagiarism
If an entire article has been copied directly from the source material, it will be deleted by an administrator. This is because altering the article will leave the plagiarized text in the article history and this is not a complete enough removal. Articles with entire sections of text copied directly from the source material might be deleted outright or might just have the offending text removed, depending on how much text there is and how significant it is.
In successfully avoiding plagiarism, it is necessary to consider the purpose of the wiki itself (see PathfinderWiki:Scope of the project for more detailed information). The wiki must summarize and cross-reference Pathfinder information in such a way that it is useful as an introduction to anyone knowing nothing or little about the setting or as a campaign tool for a GM or player, or as a supplement to the knowledge and enjoyment of a reader of Pathfinder material. If any article is functioning in such a way that it is able to eliminate completely the need to own the original source material, it is not serving the wiki (or Paizo) well.
PathfinderWiki operates under Paizo's Community Use Policy, a license which grants us the right to their intellectual property but strictly forbids the whole-cloth copying of their products in part or in whole. For more information on this policy, see Paizo's official Community Use Policy.
Dealing with plagiarism
If you discover plagiarized text in an article, you should feel bound to deal with it appropriately. Use the history of the article to try to determine which user added it. If you can discern the user responsible, check the user's contributions (the link is displayed on the left panel when on a user's page, whether or not that user page exists) and if you discover the user has been active in the past two days, leave a note on their talk page asking them to deal with it. If they have not been active within the past two days, remove the plagiarized text yourself. If you do not feel able to perform this task, you can always leave a note on an admin's talk page.