Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia

This page documents an English Wikipedia editing guideline.

Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on this guideline's talk page.

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This page in a nutshell: When copying content from one article to another, at a minimum provide a link back to the source page in the edit summary at the destination page and state that content was copied from that source. If substantial, consider posting a note on both talk pages.

Wikipedia's licensing requires that attribution be given to all users involved in creating and altering the content of a page. Wikipedia's page history functionality lists all edits made to a page and all users who made these changes, but it cannot, however, in itself determine where the text originally came from. Because of this, copying content from another page within Wikipedia requires supplementary attribution to indicate it. At a minimum, this means providing an edit summary at the destination page—that is, the page into which the material is copied—stating that content was copied, together with a link to the source (copied-from) page, e.g. Copied content from [[<page name>]]; see that page's history for attribution. It is good practice, especially if copying is extensive, to make a note in an edit summary on the source page as well. Content reusers should also consider leaving notes on the talk pages of both the source and destination.

Copying and translating information from a Wikimedia project other than the English Wikipedia is usually possible, since all Wikimedia projects use the same or compatible licensing for most of their content. The edit summary must provide either a link to the original source or a list of all contributors. There are templates that may be used on the article's talk page to add supplementary information. See § Copying from other Wikimedia projects for more info.