18AA ext2013

Hello 18AA ext2013, and welcome to Wikipedia. Your addition to Madagascar Pochard has had to be removed, as it appears to have added copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder. While we appreciate your contributing to Wikipedia, there are certain things you must keep in mind about using information from your sources to avoid copyright or plagiarism issues here.

• You can only copy/translate a small amount of a source, and you must mark what you take as a direct quotation with double quotation marks (") and a cited source. You can read about this at Wikipedia:Non-free content in the sections on "text". See also Wikipedia:Referencing for beginners, for how to cite sources here.
• Aside from limited quotation, you must put all information in your own words and structure, in proper paraphrase. Following the source's words too closely can create copyright problems, so it is not permitted here; see Wikipedia:Close paraphrasing. (There is a college-level introduction to paraphrase, with examples, hosted by the Online Writing Lab of Purdue.) Even when using your own words, you are still, however, asked to cite your sources to verify information and to demonstrate that the content is not original research.
• Our primary policy on using copyrighted content is Wikipedia:Copyrights. You may also want to review Wikipedia:Copy-paste.
• If you own the copyright to the source you want to copy or are a designated agent, you may be able to license that text so that we can publish it here. However, there are steps that must be taken to verify that license before you do. See Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials.
• In very rare cases (that is, for sources that are public domain or compatibly licensed), it may be possible to include greater portions of a source text. However, please seek help at the help desk before adding such content to the article. 99.9% of sources may not be added in this way, so it is necessary to seek confirmation first. If you do confirm that a source is public domain or compatibly licensed, you will still need to provide full attribution; see Wikipedia:Plagiarism for the steps you need to follow.
• Also note that Wikipedia articles may not be copied without attribution. If you want to copy from another Wikipedia project or article, you can, but please follow the steps in Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia.

It's very important that contributors understand and follow these practices, as policy requires that people who persistently do not must be blocked from editing. If you have any questions about this, you are welcome to leave me a message on my talk page.

Specifically, I'm referring to this edit. You added an entire paragraph and several sentences to the "Threats and decline" section that were copied verbatim or near-verbatim from websites such as BirdLife International and ARKive (see Talk:Madagascar Pochard for details), and removed some existing information. The same text was added by somebody who was not logged in shortly before, who may or may not have been you. If you did not originally write this text, you should have examined it more closely before restoring it to the article. The clearly copyright-violating text added to the "Threats and decline" section was written in a very different style from the rest of your contributions, so I spotted it quickly, but for this reason I assume none of the rest of your additions were copied.

Your earlier contributions looked useful, but because you copied text now, they will need to be checked. I would appreciate it if you would explain how this happened, and check your contributions for their similarity to their sources, removing or rewriting sections that are too similar. If you are editing as a class assignment, as you apparently are, it may be good to contact your instructor and discuss this with him/her. Sorry for this wall of text, but again, copying text is not OK on Wikipedia, because it is a violation of property rights, and intellectually dishonest. Thank you. —innotata 20:59, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

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Copyright violations are not tolerated

Please refrain from adding text copied from other websites. Copyright violation is taken very seriously by Wikipedia, so I have reverted your changes to Madagascar Pochard—see my previous message above. You may be blocked from editing if you continue to add copyrighted text. Thank you. —innotata 00:40, 29 October 2013 (UTC)