WikiQueer:Donating copyrighted materials


 * This page is for editors who would like to grant permission to WikiQueer to use their own previously published work. For information on verifying permission to use work previously published by others, see WikiQueer:Requesting copyright permission.

Often, people wish to "donate" copyrighted materials to WikiQueer. These materials may be text (including monographs, articles, etc.) or images (including photographs). They may or may not already be posted on some other web site. They may or may not actually be appropriate for inclusion in WikiQueer. This page exists to provide some guidance in these matters.

(Most of what is on this page also applies to work in the public domain, but the focus is on copyrighted materials, because they raise more complicated issues.)

What it means to donate material to WikiQueer
When you contribute material to WikiQueer, you are not giving us exclusive use of it. You still retain any rights you previously held, but you are giving non-exclusive license under Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). Note that there is no way to say "you can use this in WikiQueer, but not anywhere else or in derivative works." Also, because some derivative works may be commercial, we cannot accept materials that are licensed only for educational use or even for general non-commercial use.

Note, too, that WikiQueer's Terms of Use allow text by others or which you have co-authored with others to be imported under CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-SA-compatible license alone, without need to verify compatibility with GFDL, but text for which you hold the copyright yourself must be licensed under both CC-BY-SA and GFDL.

Please be aware that the content you donate is subject to continuous editing by the WikiQueer community. It may be added to, subtracted from, rearranged, illustrated, split into multiple articles, translated into other languages, and otherwise changed beyond your expectations. Your contribution will always be part of the page history, so you retain credit for your work — our licenses require us to provide that credit, and to ensure that you are not held liable in any sense for the changes others make to your work. Do remember that one of the benefits of this freedom to edit is that you are freely able to incorporate the improvements that others make into your own website or source work, so long as it remains under the CC-BY-SA or GFDL.

If it is important for some reason that your work remain intact, please read the guidelines for our sister project, Wikisource.

You cannot donate what someone else owns
If you are not the copyright holder of the material you cannot donate rights to WikiQueer! The last thing we want are copyright problems: we try to be ruthless in rooting out material where there is even the slightest question about our right to use it.

For example:
 * Most web pages do not allow their material to be freely copied. Unless the material is either public domain, carries a copyleft notice compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License, or you have explicit permission to use it, please don't copy and paste from other web sites into WikiQueer. (WikiQueer:Requesting copyright permission provides information on obtaining and verifying explicit permission.)
 * If you are the original author but the rights have been assigned to your publisher, you have given up the ability to license the work to us.

WikiQueer is not a universal compendium
WikiQueer is not a universal compendium. There are things we include and things we don't. Probably the best explanation of this is at the page "WikiQueer:What WikiQueer is not". In particular, we try not to include content that is below a relevant level of notability. We are open to encyclopedic articles, with cited sources and written from a neutral point of view (NPOV). The content of most websites, as written, usually does not meet these criteria, so it may be best to simply paraphrase, rather than copy verbatim. This also avoids the need to re-license the content.

Donating your photographs
If you have taken photographs that you think would be useful to WikiQueer, you can upload them to Wikimedia Commons (you will need to create an account to do this), where they can be used by any MediaWiki based project, including WikiQueer. Please, if you are uploading images, become familiar with the image copyright tags. If they are your own photos, you will probably want to use one of the following:
 * GFDL-self to retain copyright, but license your image under the GNU Free Documentation License
 * CC-BY-3.0 or CC-BY-SA-3.0 to retain copyright, but license your image under a Creative Commons license (note, not all CC licenses are accepted here, non-commercial and non-derivative licenses are not accepted)
 * Attribution or CopyrightedFreeUseProvidedThat to retain copyright, but allow the image to be used freely subject to certain restrictions, such as acknowledgment. Note that any restrictions cannot include terms from unacceptable licenses, such as "no derivative works" or "no commercial use."
 * PD-self to release your image into the public domain.

Contributions can also be dual-licensed, being subject to two different licenses, and allowing users to choose which one they want to use your content under.

We encourage you to place a descriptive caption and source information (such as when and how it was taken) onto the Image description page in addition to the image copyright tag.

Granting us permission to copy material already online
One simple way to grant permission to copy material already on line is to put that permission explicitly on the site where that material is posted. This is commonly known as a "copyleft" notice. This notice must state that your site (or portions of your site) are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts) or that it is in the public domain. For text, a good statement of release might read:


 * The text of this website [or page, if you are specifically releasing one section] is available for modification and reuse under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts).

If you do not wish to retain any rights to the work, you may instead release it under the Creative Commons Zero Waiver, which effectively releases your work into the public domain:


 * The text of this website [or page] is released under the Creative Commons Zero Waiver 1.0 (CC0).

If you verify text by placing a note at the website, you may wish to use Text release to make sure that your release is documented at the talk page of the article. Instructions for using that template can be found at Template:Text release. Please do not use this template if the release is not published at your website, as the text will need to be removed.

If you would like to license your site's content under a free license, but don't have any particular articles in mind to put the content in, you can follow the above directions, and list your site on one of the following pages, based on the type of content and license:
 * WikiQueer:Public domain resources
 * WikiQueer:Public domain image resources
 * Commons:Free media resources

If you have any further questions, see WikiQueer:Media copyright questions.

Related pages

 * WikiQueer:Copyrights
 * WikiQueer:Copyright issues - undigested talk on this topic
 * WikiQueer:Declaration of consent for all enquiries
 * WikiQueer:Example requests for permission
 * WikiQueer:Requesting copyright permission
 * WikiQueer:Copyright problems