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Revision as of 18:56, 1 January 2024
The Source namespace is for crediting other sources that your articles derive from, under the terms of the CC BY, CC BY-SA , or other licenses that require attribution. If your articles uses any licensed content, you must create a Source page for your article and list the sources you drew from. This is required to comply with the attribution terms of the licenses. You can create a Source page for your article by typing "Source:[Your Article Title]" into the searchbox, performing the search, and then clicking on the link that comes up to create the page. (There is a more user-friendly way of doing this in the works.)
Sourcing Wongery Articles
If your article derives from any other article in the Wongery that you didn't write, this counts as licensed content that you must credit on the Source page. You can do so by typing the header "==Wongery Sources==" and then putting each article on a separate line, with an asterisk before it. This will create a list. The articles listings should be links, which is achieved by putting the names in double square brackets, [[like so]]. If the article in question comes from the Central Wongery, put "Central:" before the title and a pipe character ("|") after it.
For example, suppose your article derives from two other Wongery articles: an article on the Public Wongery titled "Wallacio the Bleak", and the article on the Central Wongery titled "Wanderers". You can credit your sources by writing the following:
==Wongery Sources== * [[Wallacio the Bleak]] * [[Central:Wanderers|]]
External Sources
If your article derives from sources outside the Wongery under a Creative Commons license or another compatible license that requires attribution, you must credit these sources as well. (If you draw from a work which has been released to the public domain, you don't legally have to credit it on the Source page, but if you use a lot of material from it we suggest you do credit it as a matter of courtesy.) You may credit such sources so in a separate section, with the header "==External Sources==". If the source you use gives instructions for how to attribute it, follow those instructions; otherwise, you may specify the sources however you want, as long as they are clearly specified. Again, each source should be on a separate line, preceded by an asterisk. If the source is online, you may link to its site; for print books or other sources with no clearly associated website, no link is necessary, although you can link to the author's or publisher's page or some other relevant page if it exists.
For instance, let's say you're writing an article about an otyugh (a kind of monster from Dungeons & Dragons) who lives in Wonderland (as in, the setting of Lewis_Carroll's novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). (Note that I am not saying this is the kind of article you should write; in fact, I'd rather advise against it; but you hypothetically could.) Otyughs are in the D&D 5e System Reference Document, which has been released under the CC-BY license, so you can refer to them in the Wongery (again, you can; I'm not saying you should), but you have to credit the SRD as a source. The SRD itself tells you what legal text to use, right on the first page:
The System Reference Document 5.1 is provided to you free of charge under the terms of the (“CC-BY-4.0”). You are free to use this content in any manner permitted by that license as long as you include the following attribution statement in your own work:
- This work includes material taken from the System Reference Document 5.1 (“SRD 5.1”) by Wizards of the Coast LLC and available at https://dnd.wizards.com/resources/systems-reference-document. The SRD 5.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.
Note that this text already includes the URLs where the documents can be found; you can turn these into links by repeating the URL and putting square brackets around them, like so: [https://dnd.wizards.com/resources/systems-reference-document https://dnd.wizards.com/resources/systems-reference-document].
As for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, this is in the public domain, so you don't have to credit it on your Source page... but again, if you draw heavily from it, you probably should as a matter of courtesy. (Admittedly, this matter of courtesy is more important for the work of current writers who have been generous enough to release their work into the public domain than for a work by Lewis Carroll who, first of all, is famous enough that almost everyone is familiar with his work anyway, and second, has been dead for more than a century and thus won't particularly care if you credit him or not. But for the sake of this example let's say we want to give him credit.) You can just credit the work by the title and author. If you want to include a link, which is not required but is nice, you could link to the Wikipedia page on the book, or perhaps to where it can be read on Project Gutenberg.
So here's our full example credit:
==External Sources== * This work includes material taken from the System Reference Document 5.1 (“SRD 5.1”) by Wizards of the Coast LLC and available at [https://dnd.wizards.com/resources/systems-reference-document https://dnd.wizards.com/resources/systems-reference-document]. The SRD 5.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License available at [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode]. * This work also uses material from the book ''[https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland]'', by Lewis Carroll.
Final Words
If you're daunted by getting the formatting of your sourcing right, don't be. We're giving guidelines here for the suggested way to list your sources, but the fact that you credit your sources is more important than how you credit them, and it's better to have your list of sources badly formatted than not to have it at all.
In any case, please do credit any licensed material you draw from, either from other Wongery articles or from external sources. It's legally required by the terms of the licenses, and it's just a nice thing to do besides.