Wdennler

Wikipedia and copyright

Hello Wdennler, and welcome to Wikipedia. All or some of your addition(s) to Holy Trinity Church (Nashville) has had to be removed, as it appears to have added copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder. While we appreciate your contributing to Wikipedia, there are certain things you must keep in mind about using information from your sources to avoid copyright or plagiarism issues here.

• You can only copy/translate a small amount of a source, and you must mark what you take as a direct quotation with double quotation marks (") and cite the source using an inline citation. You can read about this at Wikipedia:Non-free content in the sections on "text". See also Help:Referencing for beginners, for how to cite sources here.
• Aside from limited quotation, you must put all information in your own words and structure, in proper paraphrase. Following the source's words too closely can create copyright problems, so it is not permitted here; see Wikipedia:Close paraphrasing. (There is a college-level introduction to paraphrase, with examples, hosted by the Online Writing Lab of Purdue.) Even when using your own words, you are still, however, asked to cite your sources to verify information and to demonstrate that the content is not original research.
• Our primary policy on using copyrighted content is Wikipedia:Copyrights. You may also want to review Wikipedia:Copy-paste.
• If you own the copyright to the source you want to copy or are a designated agent, you may be able to license that text so that we can publish it here. However, there are steps that must be taken to verify that license before you do. See Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials.
• In very rare cases (that is, for sources that are public domain or compatibly licensed), it may be possible to include greater portions of a source text. However, please seek help at the help desk before adding such content to the article. 99.9% of sources may not be added in this way, so it is necessary to seek confirmation first. If you do confirm that a source is public domain or compatibly licensed, you will still need to provide full attribution; see Wikipedia:Plagiarism for the steps you need to follow.
• Also note that Wikipedia articles may not be copied or translated without attribution. If you want to copy or translate from another Wikipedia project or article, you can, but please follow the steps in Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia.

It's very important that contributors understand and follow these practices, as policy requires that people who persistently do not must be blocked from editing. If you have any questions about this, you are welcome to leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. — Diannaa (talk) 20:15, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

Ignoring this message and just re-adding the copyrighted content is not acceptable. I have reverted your edits again. Please look over WP:COPYPASTE or you may be eventually banned from editing the encyclopedia for repeatedly plagiarizing copyrighted material.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 07:18, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

Email response

I received your email offline asking for help with copyright. Even though you wrote the content yourself on your website, that content cannot be simply copied and pasted here unless you are willing to include a statement on your website that all of the text/content therein can be used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (for more information about this type of licensing, please see WP:DONATETEXT). Even if you decided to release the content under a free license, the text as written is not fit for an encyclopedia due to its promotional nature and abundant use of puffery. Wikipedia strives to be objective, maintaining a neutral point of view in all its articles, so a sentence like, "The Church of the Holy Trinity has a history as rich as the physical edifice in which it is housed," is inappropriate for publishing here.

In fact, since you are physically connected to the church in question, this is a clear example of a conflict of interest. It is generally frowned upon for owners/leaders/others connected to a site to contribute to the article about that site, so tread lightly here. If you would like to contribute to the church's article despite the COI, please try to rewrite the history to be a bit more objective, and include citations to external sources (not just the church's website) to back up the facts you add. One example of a good source that can be used for some of the historical details is this document that was written as part of the church's application to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places back in 1971. Any fact that you add without proper citations can be challenged and removed by another editor, so be sure to add citations to everything you write.

For examples of churches similar to yours that have decent articles written about them which you may wish to emulate, see St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral (Memphis, Tennessee), St. Paul's Episcopal Church (Chattanooga, Tennessee), Calvary Episcopal Church (Cumberland Furnace, Tennessee), Christ Episcopal Church (South Pittsburg, Tennessee), Church of the Messiah (Pulaski, Tennessee), or any of the other articles listed in Category:Episcopal churches in Tennessee.

If you have any more questions about contributing to Wikipedia, feel free to edit this page and post a comment below this text or add a new section to my talk page, where I will receive a notification that you have posted there.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 05:50, 11 May 2016 (UTC)