Is it okay to copy a Wikipedia article word for word and paste it into a WikiTree profile?

Question

No. :)

"WikiTree and Wikipedia do not have the same copyright licensing policy. On WikiTree, users maintain their copyrights. See the Terms of Service. On Wikipedia, everything is GNU or Creative Commons. Therefore you should not copy back-and-forth between WikiTree and Wikipedia.

Moreover, there's no need to create a duplicate of, say, Wikipedia's Henry VIII page. You should just link to the Wikipedia article from the biography or sources section of Henry VIII's WikiTree profile.

Of course, if you're adding value and integrating other content, there's nothing wrong with using Wikipedia as a source."

See: http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Copying_from_Wikipedia

Comments

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Answer 1

Actually if one reads the text on wikipedia's copyright info section it is okay to copy text. See the user's rights and obligations the text recommends who indicates common creative license needed only if additions/editing done to text.

Comments

I see three issues involved in this question:

1. The most important issue here is that we are using WikiTree, and WikiTree's policy is not to copy pages from Wikipedia then dump them in bios because WikiTree does not have the same copyright licensing policy.  To copy pages from Wikipedia then dump them in bios is a breach of WikiTree's policy.

2. To quote Wikipedia: "All text on Wikipedia is licensed under the [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike 3.0 Unported License]"  The summary at that link says you are free to reuse or adapt under the following terms:

• Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
• ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

So that is a bit different from what Holly says in her answer above.  Dumping a copy of a wikipedia page in a profile's bio without providing a link to the licence and with no attribution to the authors in one of the ways listed below is a breach of Wikipedia's terms of use.  

Ways to attribute authors:

• Through hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the page or pages that you are re-using (since each page has a history page that lists all authors and editors);
• Through hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy that is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on the Project website; or
• Through a list of all authors (but please note that any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions).

3. The content of Wikipedia's pages may be freely reused and adapted, but what about the original authors used to source Wikipedia's articles?  When people dump copies of Wikipedia pages on bios and don't bother to cite sources then they are breaking two points from WikiTree's Honor Code:

VII. We give credit. Although most genealogy isn't copyrighted, researchers deserve credit for the work they've done.

VIII. We cite sources. Without sources we can't objectively resolve conflicting information.

In addition, reasons to use citations are "to uphold intellectual honesty (or avoiding plagiarism)" The quote comes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citations, which cites this webpage as its source: [http://integrity.mit.edu/citing-your-sources/avoiding-plagiarism-cite-your-source Avoiding Plagiarism - Cite Your Source, Massachusetts Institute of Technology].

So is it okay to copy a Wikipedia article word for word and paste it into a WikiTree profile?  Definitely not.