User talk:Jcha1040

Hello Jcha1040, and welcome to Wikipedia. Your addition to Bergen Catholic High School has had to be removed, as it appears to have added copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder. While we appreciate your contributing to Wikipedia, there are certain things you must keep in mind about using information from your sources to avoid copyright or plagiarism issues here.

You can only copy/translate a small amount of a source, and you must mark what you take as a direct quotation with double quotation marks (") and a cited source. You can read about this at Wikipedia:Non-free content in the sections on "text". See also Help:Referencing for beginners, for how to cite sources here.
Aside from limited quotation, you must put all information in your own words and structure, in proper paraphrase. Following the source's words too closely can create copyright problems, so it is not permitted here; see Wikipedia:Close paraphrasing. (There is a college-level introduction to paraphrase, with examples, hosted by the Online Writing Lab of Purdue.) Even when using your own words, you are still, however, asked to cite your sources to verify information and to demonstrate that the content is not original research.
Our primary policy on using copyrighted content is Wikipedia:Copyrights. You may also want to review Wikipedia:Copy-paste.
If you own the copyright to the source you want to copy or are a designated agent, you may be able to license that text so that we can publish it here. However, there are steps that must be taken to verify that license before you do. See Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials.
In very rare cases (that is, for sources that are public domain or compatibly licensed), it may be possible to include greater portions of a source text. However, please seek help at the help desk before adding such content to the article. 99.9% of sources may not be added in this way, so it is necessary to seek confirmation first. If you do confirm that a source is public domain or compatibly licensed, you will still need to provide full attribution; see Wikipedia:Plagiarism for the steps you need to follow.
Also note that Wikipedia articles may not be copied without attribution. If you want to copy from another Wikipedia project or article, you can, but please follow the steps in Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia.

It's very important that contributors understand and follow these practices, as policy requires that people who persistently do not must be blocked from editing. If you have any questions about this, you are welcome to leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. Excirial^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 21:21, 7 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

re: User talk:Jcha1040

Hello,

You just sent me a message that details 'doubt' of originality---I am an administrator at Bergen Catholic High School in Oradell NJ, USA and have been working on our Wikipage. The information/pictures I am using is coming from our website and photo collection. I would like to know why exactly it was deleted. I am going to be putting the info that you just deleted back on the wikipage.

Please let me know if you need any clarification. Thank you very much!

Joseph Charles Director of Admissions & Enrollment Management — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jcha1040 (talk • contribs) 21:39, 7 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I left a message on your talk page and in the history of the article itself explaining the removal (No problem if you didn't see those - just explaining that i didn't flat out delete the content you added since that would be quite impolite)

There are actually a few problems here. First and foremost is the fact that the data you added was copied directly from this page: http://www.bergencatholic.org/testpages/flagship-of-achievement. Due to legal reasons Wikipedia can only accept content that is licensed as either CC-BY-SA or GDFL, or has a copyright status compatible with these copyright licenses. The added content comes from a website that states "Copyright 2014", and the disclaimer present on the website is quite clearly not compatible with the above two licenses.

Outside the content itself there is also a problem with the content itself, and this is more or less inherent due to the fact that the content was directly copied from a website: Its promotional instead of being neutrally worded. Normally i would add some specific examples but in this case i suppose that the entire text is... well, let us say that i would expect the added text in a brochure, and not in an encyclopedic text (If you want specific examples irregardless, feel free to ask).

That brings us to the third issue. Since you're an employee at Bergen Catholic High School (To be fair: i already suspected this to be the case) you have a clear conflict of interest with the topic of the article. If it strongly discouraged (bordering not allowed in severity) to edit an article you have a conflict as interest with, as writing a neutral, encyclopedic article may be difficult or even near impossible when one has such. Just ask yourself: If the school would ever receive negative publicity, would you add this to the article? And if another editor would add a sourced section containing this criticism, would you delete it? Even if it is not intentional it often proves to be difficult to keep an article overall neutral in tone. Exceptions to the rule exist of course, but the added text is quite the polar opposite of expected article content.

I'll be removing the "FLAGSHIPS OF ACHIEVEMENT" section once more - a copyright violation is a legal issue and these quite simply cannot stay around. I've also (slightly) reworded the Golf section since it was equally promotional ("The best" is a clear example in that case). Also, that section needs sourcing. Kind regards, Excirial^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 22:04, 7 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]