Using other material on a wiki

[John]

Just wondering how one goes about using information contained on
another website. For example, there are some great Pawtucket history
or demographics. Can I just cut an paste then give attribution? Or
do I need to get permission before cutting and pasting?

It seems silly to me to "rewrite" the history when facts are facts.

Thoughts?

[BradM]

A couple of thoughts:

1 - Let good sites do their thing - no need to duplicate a lot of
stuff that is well done, researched, etc. I like to take the main
points that the viewer of PawWiki might like to see in summary and
link (with recommendations where appropriate to the site. I will send
you some links later - just a have a few minutes now on break from
yardwork. If the other site is WAY TO DETAILED or lengthy, I like to
pull out passages and just put them in Quotes with Italics with a
footnote to the source- like I did on City History. If the paragraph
is lengthy, I sometimes replace extra or not so interesting parts with
"..." - since they have the source, they can fill in the blanks if
they like. Sometimes you find Google Books results or other sites that
don't come up in search engines - I might like to quote more from them
- especially if it is different than what you find in the Wikipedia or
other top of the list articles on the subject.

2. This is all about "Fair-Use" - I will try to add some material on
the subject directly onto PawWiki. You definitely cannot upload any
copyrighted material onto WikiSpot, it is a violation of their site
rules. I did the Logo stuff for you to cover that area - which many
sites are not so particular about. Remember also that the bottom of
each page says that the material above is Creative Commons - so we
have to make sure it is or specify why there is an exception

More later, got to get back out to the grass while it is dry and sunny
(:>)

Brad