TenthFleet:Importing content
This page describes Tenth Fleet Wiki policy on importing pages, templates, and layouts from other wikis. It complements Copyrights and applies whenever material is copied or adapted from an external wiki or website.
In brief: reuse of freely licensed material is welcome, but only when its license is compatible with ours, the source is credited, and any third-party intellectual property is left behind. When in doubt, rebuild the idea natively rather than copying the source's markup.
Why this matters
Other wikis often hold well-built templates and layouts that could save us effort, and many release their community-written text under a free license that permits reuse. A free license is a grant with conditions, however, not a blanket waiver. Copying without meeting those conditions is a licensing violation; copying another community's work wholesale without a word is discourteous even when it is permitted; and importing markup that depends on the source wiki's stylesheets, extensions, or images simply leaves a broken page behind. This policy sets out how to do it properly.
License compatibility
The Tenth Fleet Wiki releases its own content under a Creative Commons license (see Copyrights). A source's license must be compatible with ours before its content can live here:
- Material under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, in the public domain, or that you authored yourself and are entitled to relicense may be imported, with attribution.
- Material under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) only – which includes the Guild Wars 2 Wiki – is not license-compatible with our Creative Commons content and must not be copied verbatim. GFDL and CC BY-SA are separate licenses; one cannot simply be relicensed as the other.
- When a GFDL-only source has a template or layout that is genuinely useful, re-implement the functionality natively instead of copying the markup. Ideas, layouts, and functionality are not copyrightable – only a specific expression is – so building an equivalent from scratch is both clean and lawful, and it lets the result match our house style.
What you may never import
- Third-party intellectual property. Game assets, artwork, logos, screenshots, character names, lore, and brand elements belong to their rights-holder and are not covered by any wiki's free license, even when the surrounding wiki text is. The Guild Wars 2 Wiki, for instance, licenses its community text under the GFDL, but the game's images, names, and content remain the property of ArenaNet and must never be copied here. Import generic, community-authored markup only; strip everything tied to the source's subject.
- Content under an all-rights-reserved or unknown license. If you cannot determine the license, leave it out.
How to import content properly
- Verify the license is compatible with ours, or confine yourself to re-implementing the idea natively.
- Attribute the source. Attribution is mandatory. As Copyrights already requires, make a note of it – in the edit summary (e.g. "Adapted from [Source] Wiki's [Page], [license]") and on the page or its talk page, naming the source wiki, the specific page(s), and the license, so the credit travels with the content.
- Remove third-party IP – images, names, lore, categories, and subject-specific content – before publishing.
- Make it work here. Confirm every dependency exists on this wiki: sub-templates, CSS classes (MediaWiki:Common.css), stylesheets, extensions, and images. Supply or adapt whatever is missing. Do not publish an import that renders broken, points at red-linked dependencies, or carries the source wiki's navigation, categories, or branding.
- Naturalize it. Rename and rewrite so the result reads as native Tenth Fleet Wiki content, in our house style, rather than a transplant.
Courtesy to the source community
A free license does not require you to ask permission – that is what the license grants – and for a page or two, correct attribution is enough. But when adopting a substantial part of another community's infrastructure (its template suite, help system, or overall layout), a brief and friendly note to that community is good manners and builds goodwill. It costs nothing and is almost always welcomed.