Wikimedia Foundation replies to Municipalist questions on McCain plagiarism charges
D.C.-based Wikipedia spokesman Dan Rosenthal responds to questions from Municipalist about the suggestion that John McCain's speech writers may have "plagiarized" from Wikipedia some material about Georgia and its history. "A Wikipedia editor" makes the charge.
Municipalist: What is Wikipedia policy on use of its content?
Rosenthal: Wikimedia's policy on use of its content is one of freedom. First, let me note that the Wikimedia Foundation does not own the article content on our projects; the individual authors who write it do. All of their contributions are licensed under the GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License), which to summarize allows free reuse, commercially or otherwise, as long as the reuser attributes the preceding authors. It's slightly more complicated than that, but that's the gist of what's important to this question.
So, Sen. McCain, or Sen. Obama, or any other person is more than welcome to use content found on our projects, as long as it is properly attributed. Now, obviously when giving a speech that quotes a line or two from an article, or using a word or two from another source, there's a different story, and there is potentially a fair use argument to be made. That being said, however, in the vast majority of instances we require attribution to the authors of the content.
Keep in mind that we have been saying repeatedly that Wikipedia should not be used as a primary source of information, and people using Wikipedia for research should always verify their information elsewhere.
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In closing, I hope the McCain campaign learns from this, as well as any campaign, organization or person who wants to use content from Wikipedia. Please do so responsibly, make sure your sources are cited, provide proper attribution, and try to use Wikipedia to dig deeper for content beyond just our articles. Doing so will go a long way toward preventing issues like this in the future.more at:
http://www.municipalist.com/2008/08/mccainpedia.html
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