How to use or reuse our content

This page is intended for those who wish to reuse material (text and/or graphics) from the Wikimedia projects — on their own website, in print, or otherwise.

The Wikimedia Foundation owns almost none of the content on Wikimedia sites — it is owned by the individual creators. However, almost all may be freely reused without individual permission under the terms of the particular license it is under — depending on what you want to do with it, you probably do not need to obtain a specific statement of permission from the Licensor.

While the copyright and licensing information supplied for each image is believed to be accurate, the Wikimedia Foundation does not provide any warranty regarding the copyright status or correctness of licensing terms. If you decide to reuse files from Commons, you should make your own determination of the copyright status of each image just as you would when obtaining images from other sources.

Warning on images of people: Even if a given image is pre-cleared with regard to copyright, this does not mean the image is pre-cleared with regards to possible personality rights, moral rights or model release, depending on jurisdiction. Take care with context when reusing images of people.

Wikipedia

You are free to use or re-use the content of any Wikipedia, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. Essentially, the fulfillment of the license requires that

one or more persons responsible for the modifications, with at least five authors of the Document, are attributed
derived content of the work will be kept under the same license and
the full text of the GFDL license is published with the new work.

A paragraph taken from an article may however not fully comply with the GFDL and be used without providing the full text of the licence.

There are two ways to reuse the content of Wikipedia, "verbatim copying" or "derived works". See w:Wikipedia:Verbatim copying.

Some Wikipedia's have a form of "gentleman's agreement" on their Project:Copyrights page which either simplifies reuse of the content for that language edition, or gives one interpretation of the license.

en: w:en:Wikipedia:Copyrights#Users.27 rights and obligations:

You may be able to partially fulfill the latter two obligations (authorship and transparent copy) by providing a conspicuous direct link back to the Wikipedia article hosted on this website.

de: w:de:Wikipedia:Lizenzbestimmungen#Praktische Anwendung in Online-Medien:

Im Falle einer Online-Weiterverbreitung von Inhalten der Wikipedia besteht ein informelles "w:de:Gentlemen-Agreement": In der Regel werden Autoren damit einverstanden sein, wenn statt einer wörtlichen Auslegung der Lizenz (physische Kopie aller relevanten Daten, Bereitstellung einer transparent copy) folgender Satz unter jeden übernommenen Artikel (im Beispiel: Artikel XYZ) gestellt wird (für Artikel):

Dieser Artikel basiert auf dem Artikel XYZ aus der freien Enzyklopädie Wikipedia und steht unter der GNU-Lizenz für freie Dokumentation. In der Wikipedia ist eine Liste der Autoren verfügbar.

fr: w:fr:Wikipédia:Réutilisation du contenu de Wikipédia:

nl: w:nl:Help:Wikipedia_citeren

Wikinews

If you want to use or reuse content from Wikinews, you have to make sure of the following:

Make a link back to the edition of Wikinews you are getting content from
Make a clear statement on the content - that it is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license

For example, a typical text included in a news story you'd be posting should state the following:

Source: Wikinews.
Licensed under the CC-By 2.5

If you want to use or reuse Wikinews content in a print or a video edition, please provide text links both to our service, and to the Creative Commons license.

In french, for wikipedia : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipédia:Réutilisation_du_contenu_de_Wikipédia

In french, for wikinews : http://fr.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Réutilisation_du_contenu_de_Wikinews