BW2aj

Welcome

Hello, BW2aj! Welcome to Wikivoyage.

To help get you started contributing, we've created a tips for new contributors page, full of helpful links about policies and guidelines and style, as well as some important information on copyleft and basic stuff like how to edit a page. If you need help, check out Help, or post a message in the travellers' pub. New users are also welcome to post any questions or concerns to the arrivals lounge. If you are familiar with Wikipedia, take a look over some of the differences here. If you want to contribute with information about the place where you live, see Wikivoyage:Welcome, locals. --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 11:13, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Copied content on England

During the night (UK time) you spent many hours editing the England page, and I thank you for lending so much of your free time to Wikivoyage.

Sorry, the positive stuff ends there, because we have quite a big problem. Much of the text you added has been copied from other sources, including copyrighted sources. I have verified this by selecting random sentences from your added content and running them through a search engine. Even the stuff that has been copied from websites with compatible licences (Wikipedia and Wikitravel for instance) hasn't been attributed to those sources, which means that all copied content is in breach of copyright law.

Wikivoyage has a creative-commons licence (copyleft) which certifies all of our content as being reusable by other individuals, websites and publications under proper attribution. This precludes the use of copyrighted material in Wikivoyage, because we have no legal right to reuse such material, nor to authorise others to do so. We can copy content from other sources which have a compatible creative commons licence, but we must attribute those sources. If we reuse copyleft material without stating our source, we're again in breach of copyright.

Unfortunately, we will have to remove all content copied from copyrighted sources. We will also remove all content copied from Wikitravel, as they are our direct competitor. Since Wikivoyage forked from Wikitravel in 2012, we have spent many years delineating our content from theirs, so that readers and search engines don't just consider Wikivoyage to be a mirror of Wikitravel. Furthermore, there is a history of litigation between us which nobody wants to repeat.

The easiest solution from my perspective is to just undo everything you've added in the past few hours and do a hard reset to the version of the page before your edits. But given the amount of effort and time you have dedicated, that solution would be rather unfair to you.

So the alternative is for you help us out: tell us which content you wrote yourself (i.e. last night, on Wikivoyage, for the first time), and tell us which content you copied and where you copied it from. I have started a new thread at Talk:England#Loads of copied content and would be grateful if you could join in there.

I appreciate this will not be very welcome news to you, but it is essential you co-operate so we can avoid removing all of your content. Please read all the pages I've linked in this message. It will also be useful for you to read Wikivoyage:Copyright-related issues and Wikivoyage:Cooperating with Wikipedia. None of us are experts on copyright law, but that means we have to tread more, rather than less, carefully when reusing content from other sources.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope to see you shortly on Talk:England. Regards, ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 11:27, 26 July 2020 (UTC)