Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-5003660-20150328044000/@comment-452-20150328142844

SlyCooperFan1, if by "generally frowned upon", you mean "many wikis have policies against it", then sure. I do not belong to a wiki which has policies against it, and I have copied several articles from Wikipedia because there was no need to reinvent the wheel.

Randomguyhere, each wiki is allowed to make their own policies. So long as you're correctly attributing the source, it is not "copyright infringement", which is a legal concept. Plagiarism is a similar moral concept, but that still only applies if you're trying to pass of someone else's work as your own. So as long as the page says "This page uses content derived from the XXX article on Wikipedia", you're fine in both cases.

One thing to consider is that you're probably going to have to keep the "content from wikipedia" notice on your page until the end of time, as it will legally continue to be "derivative content" even after you reword it.

The fact that Template:Wikipedia is a default template on all wikis shows that using wikipedia content is expected to occur on all wikis.

I expect that on the wikis which have policies against it, one of two things happened: Either of those scenarios may have occurred due to miscommunication, misunderstanding, or an actual discussion about changing the policy.
 * "You cannot copy from wikipedia without attribution" changed into "You cannot copy from wikipedia"
 * "Category:Articles_with_Wikipedia_content is a list of articles to improve" changed into "Category:Articles_with_Wikipedia_content is a list of articles to delete". (That category is also sometimes called "Category:Articles_with_content_from_Wikipedia")

The fact that different wikis have different policies about many things tends to colour the opinions of the people who edit on this wikis as to "what's normal", and cause them to spread the policies of one wiki to others without formal discussion. There are quite a few times I've seen people say "You're not allowed to X on Wikia!" regarding something which was only a local policy, and was perfectly fine elsewhere.

See also:
 * Help:Copying_from_Wikipedia
 * Old version of Help:Copying_from_Wikipedia, which was copied locally on many wikis before being redirected (example)
 * LOTR:Copying_from_Wikipedia
 * forgottenrealms Help:Converting_from_Wikipedia
 * Narutopedia:How_to_copy_from_Wikipedia
 * Psychology_Wiki:Copying_from_Wikipedia

One thing that several of those pages suggest is to immediately edit the copied page to remove templates which don't exist, and redlinks to pages you are never going to create. De-wikipedia-ing it. It's also a good time to give the article a once-over to remove false/redundant information, and to reword things to better fit in with your wiki.