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Help:Adding open license text to Wikipedia/how to

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by John Cummings (talk | contribs) at 21:08, 20 February 2017 (Creating articles from open license sources: wording). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Adding text to articles

There are two ways to add text to Wikipedia, either through the Visual editor or the Source editor.

Attributing Open license text in Visual editor

  1. Copy and paste the open license text into a Wikipedia article.
  2. Create a section called Sources above the References section and click Insert on the editing toolbar and select Template.
  3. Paste Free-content attribution into the box, click the first option and then click add template
  4. Add the relevant information into the Title, Author, Publisher, Source, URL, License statement URL (if not stated within the document) fields and License (e.g CC-BY-SA).
  5. Click Save Page and add added open license text, see the Sources section for more information to the edit summary.

Attributing Open license text in Source Editor

  • Copy and paste the open license text into a Wikipedia article.
  • Create a Sources section above the References section and paste in:
{{Free-content attribution|
|title = <!-- The title of the work -->
|author = <!-- The author of the work -->
|publisher = <!-- The publisher of the work -->
|source= <!-- The the source of the work if not from the publisher or the author -->
|documentURL = <!-- The URL of the work -->
|License statement URL = <!-- The URL of the license statement of the work if not included within the document -->
|license = <!-- The license of the work -->
}}
  • Fill in the relevant fields, the text between the <!-- --> is simply for guidance, it will not appear
  • Click Save Page and add added open license text, see the Sources section for more information to the edit summary.

Creating an article from an open license source

The process for creating articles from publication text is:

Copy: Copy the text from the open access source into Wikipedia.
Edit: Fix any formatting issues with the text, add headings and subheadings, change any wording not suitable for Wikipedia.
Add media: Add graphics from the publication by uploading them to Wikimedia Commons (where the license on the graphics allows) and add in tables (this may be made easier by using Tabula if the table is very large).
Add attribution: Add the Open Source attribution template for the publication in a section called Sources (explained above).
Cite: Add the publication as a reference at the end of every paragraph or more if needed. Find references used in the publication and add them as citations in the article.
Publish: Publish the article on Wikipedia.
Link: Create links to the new article from other articles, including adding hatnotes. The find link tool allows you to easily find and create links from other articles.