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This page is an official policy on the Forgotten Realms Wiki. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page. |
Plagiarism is defined as taking and publishing another author's work and representing it as one's own. Though not a crime per se, plagiarism does leave one liable to legal action 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 legal action (as TSR did just before they went out of business) the Forgotten Realms Wiki would be removed from Fandom and 19 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 plagiarized material is an immediate candidate for deletion. This is because the complete history of the page is readily and publicly available with only a few mouse clicks and so even if the page is rewritten, plagiarized content still exists on the article. The only way to clear this history is to delete the entire article.
Therefore all editors who notice plagiarized material on an article should add the {{Delete}} template to the top of the page.