User talk:RichT11

Welcome!

Hello, RichT11, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! —C.Fred (talk) 04:38, 2 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Please do not add copyrighted material to Wikipedia[edit]

Your addition to Whippany Railway Museum has been removed, as it appears to have added copyrighted material to Wikipedia without permission from the copyright holder. For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other websites or printed material; such additions will be deleted. You may use external websites or publications as a source of information, but not as a source of article content such as sentences or images. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. —C.Fred (talk) 04:38, 2 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm the administrator who removed the content from Whippany Railway Museum. A couple of things.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that operates under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and the GNU Free Documentation License. Text in encyclopedia articles must comply with those licenses, except for short direct quotes. The full history section of the museum's website does not meet that exception. Accordingly, the all-rights-reserved history from the museum's website may not be used on Wikipedia.

It is possible for the museum to donate the material to Wikipedia by placing the text under a free license. Be warned that this "uncorks the genie from the bottle": the text is then free for anybody to use for any purpose, including commercial reuse, with nothing more than attribution due back to the museum. The donation of content is irrevocable; you can't re-restrict the text once you've donated it.

Be also advised that even if you donate the history, it can—and almost assuredly will—be edited by other editors on Wikipedia. Nobody owns articles; all editors can make legitimate, good-faith edits to them.

You should also read up on conflicts of interest, as you have admitted to one regarding the museum. In a nutshell, you may edit the museum's article, but you should exercise great caution in doing so. You are under the same restrictions as all other editors are in terms of making sure your edits are verifiable and using reliable sources. —C.Fred (talk) 04:57, 2 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, and as another editor pointed out at the help desk: the restriction is on the words in the history, not the facts and ideas. You are welcome to write a history of the museum in your own words–or new words, as the case may be—which will then be freely licensable under CC and GFDL. —C.Fred (talk) 04:59, 2 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]