User talk:Brettcole

Hi Brettcole - unfortunately, your recent contribution on the Tropical Science Center had to be deleted since it was a direct copy-and-paste from this website, infringing on the rights of its copyright owner. Please don't let this experience discourage you from contributing here, but just make sure that anything you write is entirely your own words. Cheers --Rlandmann (talk) 04:28, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for being so up-front about it Brett. Wikipedia is intended to be a free content encyclopedia, meaning that all the text and practically all the images are available for anyone, anywhere, to reproduce for whatever purpose they like. Obviously, however, contributors can only "donate" text that they themselves own.

If you feel up to it, it would be really great if you could give us even a couple of sentences in your own words about the Preserve - it would be better than the redirect that's in place there now. If you've been professionally affiliated with them, you should probably also leave a note on the article talk page to state that - in order to avoid any perceived conflict of interest ( see the policy here.

Your honesty is greatly appreciated. Cheers --Rlandmann (talk) 21:00, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

Actually, it's a little tricky if someone from TSC copies-and-pastes from their own website. Like I said above, the material in Wikipedia needs to be free for anyone to copy and reproduce at will. Conversely, the TSC website notes that all rights to their material are reserved, which is incompatible with this fundamental aim of Wikipedia. TSC would therefore also need to change the copyright information on their website to tell the world that it's OK to take their text and redistribute it and/or modify it, without any further permission from TSC. Without TSC releasing the material on their website under a copyleft licence like GFDL or CC-BY, Wikipedia still couldn't use it, even though it were contributed by the copyright owner themselves.

As for how we detect such things, yes, there are automated processes that help out, but a lot of potential infringements are spotted by humans. When you've been here a while, you start to learn to recognise patterns. It's an imperfect process and many slip by under the radar; I recently came across a few that seem to have gone undetected for around two and a half years! --Rlandmann (talk) 22:02, 24 July 2008 (UTC)