Forgotten Realms Wiki:Plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined as taking and publishing another author's work and representing it as ones own. Though not a crime per se, plagiarism does leave one liable to law suits for copyright infringement.

Forgotten Realms Wiki does not generate any revenue and so if Wizards of the Coast (who owns the copyright on almost all Forgotten Realms materials) decides to pursue that kind of legal action (as TSR did just before they went out of business) the Forgotten Realms Wiki would be removed from wikia and 7 years of work would essentially cease to exist.

To avoid the possibility of this happening, editors MUST write all articles with original language.

Editors MAY NOT copy the original source material verbatim if they wish to publish to this site. Articles must be written with significant differences to the language used in the source material while still getting across the pertinent facts in an encyclopedic way.

An article found with plagiarised material is an immediate candidate for deletion. This is because the complete history of the page is readily and publically available with only a few mouse clicks and so even if the page is rewritten, plagiarised content still exists on the article. The only way to clear this history is to delete the entire article.

Therefore all editors who notice plagiarised material on an article should add the template to the top of the page.